


Leech

by draculard



Category: Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Animal Death, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Coma, Force-Feeding, Graphic Depictions of Illness, M/M, Medical Examination, Mental Link, Meta, Metafiction, Minor Character Death, Mute Thrawn, Muteness, Parasites, Slow Burn, Starvation, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2020-09-28 17:11:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20429519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: When Dr. Eli Vanto is called to Lycia House, he assumes his new patient is Master Pellaeon.He's wrong.





	1. Chapter 1

It was a magnificent house, and Eli was already enthralled before he caught sight of the sculpture in the parlor. It was set to the side of the staircase and directly across from the window, mounted on a little pedestal where the light was sure to shine upon it at midday.

The outer shell was translucent; its interior had been filled with a cloudy blue substance Eli couldn’t quite identify, making it appear as though whatever this sculpture was, it was filled with the sea. He was still examining it — one hand hovering over the translucent shell, the other clutched tightly around the handle of his saddle bag — when a voice from the staircase startled him out of his reverie.

“Doctor Vanto.”

He turned, snatching his hand away from the sculpture. The man on the staircase was white-haired and pale; he smiled a little and slowly made his way down the rest of the stairs, clutching the railing.

“Mr. Pellaeon,” Eli guessed. He was given no greeting in turn; the other man approached slowly and silently, giving Eli plenty of time to study him — a stiff walk, a pinched downturn to his lips. He shuffled his feet when Pellaeon joined him by the sculpture.

“It’s a ghost shark, you know,” Pellaeon said. Unlike Eli, he caressed the sculpture without compunction, running his hand up to the dorsal fin. “This spine you see here—” He touched it gently. “—is venomous, used for protection. And this—” He touched a small, almost invisible ridge on the sculpture’s gills. “—is an ectoparasitic flatworm.”

He looked at Eli for a moment; then his nose twitched and he quickly looked away, back to the sculpture. “_Chimaericola leptogaster,_” he said, running his finger over the parasite. “It’s really an exquisitely crafted piece.”

“Yes,” Eli agreed, but he couldn’t wait to get away from it. He turned to Pellaeon, smiling uneasily, and clasped his bag with both hands. 

“You were referred to me by a trusted colleague,” said Pellaeon. He didn’t return Eli’s smile. “She told me you were…”

_ Discreet, _ Eli’s brain filled in automatically, based on past experiences with wealthy patients.

“Innovative,” Pellaeon said instead. His eyes flicked down to Eli’s black bag, his face drawn. “The patient is upstairs.”

With that, he finally turned away from the sculpture, making his way back to the staircase. Eli stumbled over his own feet trying to follow him.

“The — the patient?” he repeated. “I was under the impression you were the patient, sir.”

Pellaeon made no response. All Eli could see of him was his back, clad in fine but aged clothes as he made his way slowly up the stairs.

“I wasn’t aware you had family, sir,” Eli tried again. Pellaeon glanced over his shoulder, smiling — grimacing? — briefly.

“Not as such, no,” he said. At the top of the staircase, he turned left and led Eli down a hallway decorated with subtlety and taste. Eli’s gaze wandered over a strange assortment of paintings and woodcuts on the walls — an oil landscape of a winter storm with a small lump of a man in the corner, drowning beneath the snow; the finest and most gruesome medical illustrations Eli had seen since school; and a painting which simply could not be ignored. Eli found himself drifting toward it, slowing his pace until Pellaeon was far ahead of him so he could read the small, polished plaque beneath the frame.

_ Coal Miner and Hookworm_.

Shuddering, Eli turned away — and found Pellaeon staring back at him, his face grave. Eli opened his mouth, but he couldn’t force out an apology. His mind was consumed by the deep, loamy color of the oil painting, by the glimmers of faint light that suggested something wet and squirming hidden far beneath the surface.

“He’s through here,” Pellaeon said. He indicated the door across from him, then tucked his hands close to his belt, averting his eyes. Eli hesitated a moment. When he knocked on the door, the sound seemed to be swallowed up by the thick, hand-carved wood.

There was no answer from inside. Pellaeon, nose twitching again, looked at the floor.

“He’s waiting for you,” he said.

“Right,” said Eli. Heart in his throat, he opened the door.

And, exhaling a long, shuddering breath, eased it closed again. For just a second, Eli rested his forehead against the cool wood, unable to hear anything other than the rush of his heartbeat in his ears. He felt flushed, with sweat gathering under his collar and making him itch.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper. Pellaeon’s face was wooden.

“That’s what you’re here to find out.”

“His skin…” Eli’s tongue felt heavy, his mouth dry. He closed his eyes and pushed away from the door, trying desperately to work some moisture back into his mouth.

Trying not to seem quite so unnerved. 

“It’s unusual, I know,” said Pellaeon. Finally, he met Eli’s gaze again, and his eyes were old and weary. “You’d best go inside, Doctor.”

There was something unspoken there; Eli could see the flicker of Pellaeon’s eyelids, the brief compression of his lips as he swallowed his words. What could it be? The two options which sprang to mind were horribly similar but uniquely daunting, and each of them left Eli feeling strangely out of breath.

_ You don’t want to keep him waiting, _Pellaeon might have said. Or:

_ You don’t want to offend him. _

He steadied himself and once again opened the door. 

* * *

The man inside was tall and well-built, with the upright posture of a healthy, well-bred man. He did not recline in bed as many of Eli’s patients did when he visited them at home; instead, he stood at the window with his back to the door, only his hands visible from behind.

Where Pellaeon seemed to perpetually sag with exhaustion, this man stood with an easy strength coiled in his muscles — the grace of an athlete or a soldier.

Yet he was ill. That much was undeniable. Eli kept his eyes on the back of the man’s head — on the trimmed blue-black hair — and tried not to stare at what he could see of the man’s skin.

_ Cholera_, he thought on first instinct, his gut wrenching, but even then he knew he was wrong. There was something unnatural about that shade — a deeper tinge of blue than Eli had ever seen, even on the dead. 

He took a deep breath, and the man at the window heard him and turned around, and that made everything so much worse. The tinge of blue covered every inch of him — not just his hands, but also his face and neck — and it all culminated in his terrible eyes.

To call them bloodshot would be an understatement. The threads of red that wound over his eyes seemed to absorb any hint of another color underneath; Eli watched, waiting without fully realizing it for drops of blood to spill over the stranger’s lower lashes. But the man did not bleed; he smiled.

And said nothing.

“I’m Doctor Eli Vanto,” Eli said, clutching the strap of his saddle bag. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. “I-I was invited by Mr. Pellaeon. To have a look at you.”

He regretted those words before they were fully out of his mouth; by the time he hit ‘look,’ he was wincing. He made it sound like the man were some sort of intriguing specimen brought to Eli for his own entertainment. But the man at the window didn’t react adversely; he didn’t react at all, really. His smile softened — to say it faded would be inaccurate — and he made an almost courtly gesture, indicating a cushioned chair in the corner of the room.

Uncertainly, Eli took it, perching his bag on his lap. The blue-tinged stranger folded himself down onto the window seat, hands clasped on his knee, and regarded Eli with open curiosity.

“His name is difficult to pronounce.”

Eli jumped; Pellaeon had followed him into the room and was leaning heavily against the doorframe. The stranger’s eyes flicked to him — or so it seemed — and then back to Eli. His pupils, Eli saw, had been completely eaten away by the strange red film over his eyes. 

“He wrote it down for me once,” Pellaeon continued. “Mitth’raw’nuruodo.”

The glottal stops in that long, completely foreign name took Eli by surprise. He’d never heard anything like the sounds Pellaeon had just made, even when he’d traveled with his father as a young man.

“He permits me to call him Thrawn,” said Pellaeon. “I assume he extends the same courtesy to you.”

The stranger — Thrawn — made no move to confirm this assumption. Eli struggled to ascertain how Pellaeon got ‘Thrawn’ from the long name he’d said before, but he found it too difficult to remember the sounds, let alone dissect them.

“Thrawn,” he said, with a respectful nod, liking the way the name sounded when it sprang from his throat. He found himself acclimating to the strange skin and eyes, though it was still difficult not to stare.

“He doesn’t speak,” said Pellaeon. Eli glanced at him, eyebrows raised, then back to Thrawn. He tried a sign he’d learned on a visit to Hartford Asylum; Thrawn’s eyes flicked down, studying Eli’s hands. He repeated the sign to Eli — perfectly mimicked after only one demonstration, but not the answer Eli was looking for.

“Deaf and dumb?” Eli asked.

“Neither,” said Pellaeon. “He _ doesn’t _ speak. Not anymore.”

“But you understand English?” Eli asked, directing the question to Thrawn. He waited for an answer and received none.

“He spoke to me once,” said Pellaeon, his words sounding strangely stiff and precise. “When I found him.”

“When you…” Eli glanced away from Thrawn too quickly, and immediately got the impression that he’d missed something important in the other’s face. He looked back, expecting to see something familiar — that soft smile from earlier, or maybe just a twitch of the lips — but Thrawn’s face was blank.

“When I found him,” Pellaeon repeated, “he spoke a language I’d never encountered before. He quickly realized I didn’t understand him; he hasn’t spoken since.”

“And you’ve been caring for him since then?” asked Eli. Pellaeon gave no answer; his eyes were locked on Thrawn’s. Eli shelved the question and searched for another one. “Where did you find him?”

“It was last winter,” said Pellaeon. He didn’t look at Eli as he spoke; his gaze, it seemed, was always on either Thrawn or the floor. There was a remarkable look on his face when he stared at the blue-skinned stranger — a look of respect and loyalty so deep that it unnerved Eli, especially compared to the brisk, almost nervous way Pellaeon spoke. “I found him unconscious in the snow, the night of that godforsaken blizzard.”

Eli twitched, looking at Thrawn with new eyes. That blue tinge couldn’t possibly be gangrene, could it? He’d seen it — God, he couldn’t forget it — on a pair of children who’d died in that blizzard, walking home from school. The snow had come so quickly, so unexpectedly, that many people had been outside and far from home when it hit. And those children had been the most awful shade of blue.

Still, Eli had never heard of anyone who maintained the sickly color of gangrene without the rotting flesh. He picked up his chair and moved it closer to Thrawn, sitting so that Thrawn’s knee was between his own. Thrawn went still at that, studying Eli’s face warily, but he did not move away.

“May I examine you?” Eli asked. Thrawn’s eyes bored into him, so deeply red that they seemed almost to glow. After a moment with no response, Eli turned to Pellaeon.

“He understands the question, I believe,” said Pellaeon lowly. He raised one hand to his throat, fingers wrapping around it gently. “It’s possible, isn’t it, that his vocal cords are merely damaged?”

“Perhaps,” said Eli. He reached for Thrawn’s right hand, gingerly taking it in his own. The fingers were long and slender, each the same strange shade of blue as Thrawn’s face — not the blackened, dead flesh he’d seen on those children after their death. He curled Thrawn’s fingers into the palm slowly, and then released them. When he let go, Thrawn straightened his fingers as slowly as Eli had curled them, stretching them out and then bending them again.

He held his hand up near Eli’s face, turning his wrist gradually, so Eli could see his fingers move from every angle as he flexed them. Then, still studying Eli’s expression, Thrawn let his hand drop.

“Dexterity seems fine,” Eli said, gracing Thrawn with an encouraging smile. “Can you hold a pencil?”

Thrawn, of course, did not answer.

“As I said, he wrote his name for me,” Pellaeon said. “He used my ink pen.”

“When was this? Last winter?”

“Last month,” said Pellaeon. 

Again, Eli turned to Thrawn. “Can you hold a pencil for me?” he asked. “Nod your head yes or no.”

For a moment, he thought he would get no response. Then, microscopically, Thrawn nodded. Eli glanced at Pellaeon, who after a moment’s hesitation crossed to the desk and retrieved a small, dull stick from one of the drawers. He handed it not to Eli but directly to Thrawn.

Demonstrating for Eli, Thrawn held the pencil — but he held it incorrectly, Eli noticed. Not resting atop his middle finger with the thumb on top to guide it, but instead dangling loosely between his thumb and his two longest fingers.

“Very good, thank you,” Eli said, though really it didn’t tell him much. “Can you hold it like you’re writing?”

Thrawn did not change the pencil’s position. Instead, he responded to Eli’s prompt by tracing patterns in the air with the dangling pencil — almost like he was holding a calligraphy brush, Eli realized. 

“Here,” said Eli, and he carefully rearranged Thrawn’s fingers around the pencil. He tried to ignore the intense, bright stare Thrawn gave him while he manipulated the other man’s hand. “Mr. Pellaeon, if you please…?”

Before he could finish the sentence, Pellaeon had already fetched a sheet of stationery and laid it across a leatherbound book, which he handed to Thrawn. Thrawn stared blankly at it, then looked back up at Eli, an expression of pleasant curiosity on his face.

Eli was uncomfortably aware of Pellaeon lingering between the two of them, his posture stiff, his arms held awkwardly at his sides. He turned to Eli with blank, dead-looking eyes.

“What shall he write?” asked Pellaeon, his voice strangely hushed. He seemed a shade whiter than before, his nose twitching intensely in an otherwise-still mask of a face. Eli glanced at Thrawn, whose easy, polite expression had not changed, and felt a trickle of uneasiness creeping up his neck.

He took a breath and did his best to push the sensation aside. Pellaeon had said that Thrawn knew how to write his name — this was in no way an indicator of his literacy, as most anyone, literate or not, could do at least that much. As such, it was necessary to find something to test him to some small degree.

“Write the name of your caretaker, if you please,” Eli said. Thrawn studied him, perhaps not understanding the words. Then he smiled slightly and shifted his pencil to his left hand, arranging his fingers in more-or-less the same way Eli had shown him.

In neat, elegant script, he wrote, _ Gilad Pellaeon_.

Behind Eli, Pellaeon let out a quiet sigh and shuffled back to the door. 

“Very good,” Eli said. “Keep the pencil — your penmanship is excellent, by the way.” 

Thrawn gave no reaction.

“Can you tell me anything about your current condition?” Eli asked, gesturing toward the paper. “List your symptoms and tell me when they began?”

“The blizzard—” Pellaeon blurted, and then stopped abruptly, his eyes shuttered. Eli glanced back at him, noted the sweat on Pellaeon’s pale brow, and said,

“I’d like for him to write it down.”

“Of course,” Pellaeon said, barely audible. Eli turned again to Thrawn and found the strange man studying him. He was struck once more by the contrast between the ill man and his host — Thrawn’s posture was upright and easy, his face relaxed, his body well-muscled. Except for his skin and eyes, he seemed healthy.

Under Eli’s watchful gaze, he bent his hand to the paper and began to write. 

When he turned the paper ‘round for Eli to see, there was nothing there but gibberish.

“What is this?” Eli asked. He took the sheet from Thrawn and held it closer to his eyes, thinking perhaps it was simply rushed, illegible English script. But it was entirely foreign to him; he could see several odd, unfamiliar letters repeated throughout the paragraph or so that Thrawn had written, but these letters were as meaningless to him as Aramaic.

“His native tongue,” said Pellaeon, leaning over Eli’s shoulder to see. 

“You recognize it?”

Pellaeon hesitated, moving back a step. The fingers of his right hand rubbed together anxiously, an unconscious gesture Eli was sure he never noticed. When he met Pellaeon’s eyes, the other man’s mouth was twitching at the corners.

“What else can it be?” said Pellaeon, his voice little more than a breath. Eli turned his gaze back to the paper, a frown tugging at his lips.

“Yes,” he said speculatively. “I suppose you’re right. Thrawn—”

Thrawn raised his chin, eyes fixed solidly on Eli’s. How could he see like that, Eli wondered, with that strange red film over his eyes?

“I’d like to take your vital signs,” Eli said, pushing the thought away. He opened his saddle bag and tipped it toward Thrawn, briefly showing him the tools within. Thrawn leaned forward in his seat, examined the contents, and sat back looking even more thoughtful than before. His gaze flickered toward Pellaeon, who muttered something from the corner — something Eli couldn’t quite decipher, but which sounded like, _ Check them. _

Eli emptied his saddle bag slowly, placing each instrument near Thrawn on the window seat, where his patient could more easily satisfy his curiosity. Thrawn stayed as he was, legs crossed and hands folded over them, until each and every instrument had been put in its place. Then, with a glance toward Eli, he picked up the snake-ear trumpet and examined it closely, holding it delicately in his hands.

“The fit, the finish,” said Pellaeon, surprising Eli and sounding almost like he was choking on his words, “the overall artistry of these instruments is truly exquisite, Dr. Vanto.”

“Oh,” said Eli, flummoxed. And because he could think of nothing else to say: “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Some of them,” Pellaeon continued; his voice was garbled, and when Eli turned to look at him, his cheeks were flushed with strain. “Some of them are quite utilitarian but others have been crafted with fine material and great care. Of particular note is…”

He trailed off, suddenly turning pale again. Thrawn carefully lay the snake-ear trumpet back on the window seat and selected another tool.

“What is this?” Pellaeon asked. Eli glanced over his shoulder at him, intending to follow his gaze to see what Pellaeon was asking about, but Pellaeon was staring at his shoes, and there was nothing of particular interest there.

“This,” said Pellaeon, raising his head to meet Eli’s eyes. They stared at each other, and after a moment Pellaeon’s gaze wavered, his eyes focusing not on Eli but on Thrawn and the instrument in his hands. Pellaeon nodded at it.

“Oh,” said Eli again, feeling extraordinarily off-balance. “It’s a lancet,” he said, which he felt was rather obvious. “For bloodletting.”

“With tortoiseshell inlay on the handle,” Pellaeon noted. “And a case to match.”

“Yes.”

“Even your syringe case is engraved with remarkable craftsmanship,” Pellaeon said at the precise moment that Thrawn abandoned the lancet and opened Eli’s syringe set to peek inside. “You have a fine taste for art, Doctor Vanto. You seem inclined to carry small reminders of it everywhere you go. Do you consider these to be instruments or sculptures?”

“Instruments,” said Eli immediately. Though he felt he could scarcely follow Pellaeon’s words, he understood the last question well enough to answer.

“And what will you do with them?” Pellaeon asked. Thrawn’s eyes were on Eli’s face; they were childishly wide, but the studious, searching glint in them was entirely adult. Eli opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, his eyebrows furrowed. He turned in his seat and cast Pellaeon a puzzled glance.

“You’ve been examined by doctors before, surely,” he said, and suddenly Pellaeon looked almost disoriented.

“Of course,” he murmured. Eli studied him a little while longer, but Pellaeon was staring at his shoes again, and Eli couldn’t read his face. Reluctantly, he turned again to face Thrawn, who smiled slightly, his red eyes crinkling before he cast his gaze back down to the syringes.

“Proceed, then,” said Pellaeon softly. 

“If you please,” said Eli to Thrawn, “I’d like to listen to your heartbeat.”

Thrawn nodded. He watched closely as Eli selected the snake-ear trumpet and placed the earpiece in his ear, maneuvering the flexible tube of the trumpet until the other end was placed over Thrawn’s heart. The beat he heard was steady and slow.

“You’ve a runner’s heart, sir,” said Eli; he glanced up but his words this time elicited no response from Thrawn. “Take a deep breath for me, if you will.”

Thrawn obeyed, and Eli could detect no anomalies or obstructions in his breathing. He placed the snake-ear trumpet back in the saddle bag.

“Open your mouth, please,” he said.

Thrawn obeyed. Barely.

“Wider,” Eli said.

Eyebrows furrowed, Thrawn stretched his lips further, revealing healthy pink gums, a complete set of teeth (all white, Eli noted with some surprise, and remarkably straight), and a tongue marred by what looked to be a mass of nasty scars. Eli put his fingers underneath Thrawn’s chin and gently tilted it upward, cocking his head so that the meager light from a nearby candle shone into his mouth.

“Did you injure your tongue at some time in your life, sir?” Eli asked. Slowly, Thrawn closed his mouth, his teeth clacking against each other lightly, and shook his head. “So these scars — you’ve always had them?”

“Scars?” asked Pellaeon in a rasp. He moved forward clumsily, his feet catching on the carpet, and bent forward directly in front of the candlestick, obscuring the light; Eli leaned back, his irritation barely concealed. Thrawn, mouth closed, endured Pellaeon’s close scrutiny with a bemused smile. 

It was only when Eli nodded at him that Thrawn opened his mouth and extended his tongue for Pellaeon to see. 

“Oh,” Pellaeon said, almost inaudibly. He stepped away and Thrawn closed his mouth again with an amused glint in his eye that set Eli’s thoughts racing. “No scars there, Dr. Vanto. Thrawn is in possession of an uncommon — but utterly natural — physiological quirk. That’s all.”

“It’s no physiological quirk I’ve ever heard of,” said Eli, perhaps a little gruffly.

“I believe it’s called a cartographer’s tongue,” said Pellaeon. “Those lesions on the surface lend him a sensitivity to touch and taste most men could never dream of.”

Eli eyed Thrawn, who was watching him with those dreadful red eyes. He tried to identify the tone in Pellaeon’s voice and didn’t like what he came up with. “I suppose he wrote all this information down for you, at some point,” Eli said, trying not to sound as cross as he felt. There was a brief pause.

“Yes,” said Pellaeon. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Eli echoed. He stared at Thrawn and Thrawn stared back, no hint of emotion on his face other than the glint Eli had spied before of cat-like amusement.

“Mr. Pellaeon,” said Eli without breaking eye contact with Thrawn, “will you leave us?”

Pellaeon hesitated.

“Momentarily?” Eli asked.

It was a long moment before Pellaeon obeyed; Eli could feel tension drawn tight like a string between them. He willed Pellaeon not to argue (although he knew, as a man of science, that ‘willing’ people was pure fantasy, he still found himself doing it in situations like these, without thinking), and in time Pellaeon shuffled his feet and left the room with a dark look on his face.

Thrawn and Eli were alone. 

Silently, Eli gathered up the remainder of his instruments from where they lay in neat little rows on Thrawn’s window seat, placing each one back in his bag. 

“There’s no use continuing these tests,” said Eli briskly — but quietly, lest Pellaeon be eavesdropping outside the door. “It’s clear to me that somehow, despite the malady attached to your skin and eyes, you’re as healthy as a horse, sir.”

He snapped the broken clasp on his saddle bag shut — it took multiple tries — and looked up at Thrawn again, this time wearing a fierce glare. “It’s Mr. Pellaeon who’s ill,” he said in hushed tones. “Any fool could see that, doctor or no. Tell me honestly, sir — is this a game the two of you are playing with me? Some sort of hoax?”

Thrawn remained silent, watching Eli with that infuriating, satisfied gleam in his eyes. 

“I must assume it is,” said Eli bitterly, “for I can think of no other reason, bar madness, for a well-bred gentlemen such as Mr. Pellaeon to carry on like this. All gentlemen are well-behaved and courtly until they find a low-bred class-pretender upon which they can inflict some petty cruelty.”

For the first time, Thrawn’s face gave way to an expression of polite confusion. It occurred to Eli — not for the first time — that Thrawn may be something of a helpless bystander in all this. A man from the village, perhaps, hired by Pellaeon to participate in a prank on the low-class doctor. 

What, precisely, was Pellaeon planning in the first place? Had he hoped Eli would take the news of Thrawn’s strange skin condition public — publish a paper, perhaps? — only for Pellaeon to reveal the condition to be nothing but a new, expensive, undetectable body paint?

Eli sighed, rubbing his temples. He’d thought he was past these types of foolish endeavors by the local gentry. It had been months since anyone in the village sneered at him; years since the last instance of overt cruelty. Worse still that it should come from Pellaeon, by all accounts a true gentleman, even to his social inferiors.

Wearily, he looked up at Thrawn, who was still watching him. “I don’t suppose you can actually speak, can you?” Eli asked. “Just to tell me why he’s doing this? A man so ill ought to be—”

_ I can speak. _

Eli froze. He had heard the words clearly, in a cultured voice entirely foreign to him, a voice which shared Pellaeon’s accent but which certainly didn’t belong to him. A voice as close to him as Thrawn was now — clear as day, so loud it may have been speaking into his ear.

And Thrawn’s lips hadn’t moved.


	2. Chapter 2

Once he was away from Lycia House, after a long, brisk ride home on horseback in the dark, after a stiff drink of brandy, the facts were perfectly clear:

Eli Vanto did not hallucinate. 

He was too confident in his own well-trained mind, in his extensive education, to believe anything he experienced was an illusion. That left him only one option — that he truly met a blue-skinned, red-eyed mute that day.

That Thrawn communicated to Eli, however briefly, with his mind. 

But that was impossible, just as it was impossible for Thrawn to have survived the blizzard, just as it was impossible for him to walk around, alive and well, when his entire body was bruised with frostbite. So Eli did what any rational, well-educated man would do when faced with impossibility.

He ignored it.

He drank more brandy.

* * *

It was late in the month, nearly December, when Eli saw Pellaeon again. He had walked to a house call in the countryside not far from his townhouse, where the fields were brown and dead. During the day, that walk had been brisk and refreshing, and he’d treasured every wild sight along the path — the deer bedding down near the edge of the woods and glancing at him as he passed by, the woodchucks chasing each other and the moles scurrying through fallen leaves, the few autumn wildflowers spilling over the dirt road. 

Now, at dusk, the walk seemed wholly different. With the sun red and low at his back, everything before Eli was in shadow, and the temperature had dropped so low he longed for his winter gloves and comforter. His mouth was dry from lack of water; his entire body ached from the long day, and he desperately wished he’d brought his horse. 

Before him loomed the old stone kirk, abandoned when the minister had come to town last fall and organized the congregation to build a new, bigger one in town. 

The empty year had been unkind to the old kirk. Its west face and belltower had already begun to crumble; its stained-glass windows had been poached for the new building, leaving dark holes in every wall. Vines — as dead and brown now as the fields — crawled over every stone. 

And there was someone standing in the churchyard, so still that for a moment Eli thought they were a scarecrow. Someone tall and thin, dressed for a funeral.

It was Mr. Pellaeon. Eli couldn’t see his face, but he was sure of it. There was no one in town quite so tall and gaunt, and as the only local doctor, he was well enough acquainted with everyone to tell them apart by silhouette. But why was Mr. Pellaeon out here, so far from Lycia House? Where was his horse, his cart?

Why was he standing outside the old abandoned kirk with no valet, no driver, no companion at all? Why was he so still he could have been a statue in the churchyard?

Why did he face the road, watching Eli’s approach?

_ Speak to him, _ Eli urged himself as he grew nearer to the kirk. _ Inquire after Thrawn’s health. Greet him, at the very least. Be polite. _

But no words would come out — and worse, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t force himself to look the figure in the eye. He could barely bring himself to think of it as Mr. Pellaeon rather than some profane shadow, a specter dogging him on his way home.

He walked past it mutely, keeping his eyes on the dark horizon. In his peripheral vision, he could see Pellaeon’s head turning so slowly his neck seemed to creak, eyes following Eli as he walked past.

But Pellaeon did not greet him, nor did Eli greet Pellaeon. He kept his eyes on the distant chimney stacks of the town, growing closer with every step. When he finally dared to look back, the sun was so low he could scarcely make out the outline of the crumbling stone kirk, let alone the tall, thin figure standing just outside it, watching Eli go. 

* * *

There was a boy on Eli’s doorstep, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette impatiently as he waited for the doctor to return home. In his hand was the familiar sealed envelope of the local telegram station. Eli had pulled a flask from his pocket as he turned down the drive, before he saw the boy, and now he had to wedge it into his elbow as he ripped open the envelope. 

He read it quickly, leaning against his own front door while the delivery boy waited. Then he read it again.

“Who dictated this?” he asked. The boy fidgeted, eager to get back to work — or, more likely at this time of day, to return home for supper. There was a smudge of dirt on his chin.

“A manservant, sir,” he said.

“Did you see him?”

The boy huffed, started to roll his eyes, and then remembered he was talking to a gentleman and churlishly corrected his behavior. “He weren’t dictating to _ me, _ sir. I just deliver them.”

“But he came to your office in person?” Eli persisted. He was gripping the telegraph so hard it started to wrinkle and he had to consciously relax his fingers and smooth the paper out. He was exhausted from the long walk into town, and all he wanted was to curl up before the fire with a fresh bottle of brandy at his side.

“I don’t _ know, _ sir,” said the boy with strained patience. “I weren’t there.”

Shaking his head, Eli pressed a coin into the boy’s hand and sent him off. For the next thirty seconds, he stood utterly still on his doorstep, staring down at the telegram. 

Of course, whoever dictated this _ must _ have come into the telegram station. There was no other option — unless they sent a letter with this message, but what was the point of sending a letter to a telegram station instead of directly to the recipient? 

But Thrawn couldn’t have gone down to the station — not unless he’d recently made a miraculous recovery — and Pellaeon hadn’t had any manservants that Eli had seen. The figure he’d seen outside of town, that had been at around six p.m., the same time stamped at the bottom of the telegram urging him to come to Lycia House. It was impossible for Pellaeon to be at the telegram station when Eli had seen him, horse-less and cart-less, at the kirk.

_ I can speak, _Thrawn had said. Eli shivered just remembering the words, the strange, echoing voice in his head, the headaches and nausea which had plagued him afterward. Which plagued him still.

He read the telegram again:

GILAD PELLAEON ILL STOP 

MEDICAL ASSISTANCE REQUESTED STOP 

DR ELI VANTO TO PROCEED TO LYCIA HOUSE AT ONCE

There was no formal end to the message. No signature, no period, no final STOP. Eli rubbed his forehead, eyes tracking blindly over the words, and tried to remember just how ill Pellaeon had looked when last they met. Had he been as thin as the figure outside the kirk? Had there been a figure at all? 

Remembering was a futile effort. What filled his head instead was, inexplicably, that ghastly oil painting. _ Coal Miner and Hookworm. _What sort of man chose that painting for his walls?

A sick man, Eli thought. And not just in body.

He prepared his saddle bag mechanically, with numb fingers. He was all too aware of the darkness outside, edging from dusk into night. 

By the time he arrived, Lycia House would be so dark that a lantern couldn’t light it, and, if today’s sky was any indicator, the moon would be hidden behind grey clouds.

He tried not to imagine what he might see staring back at him through the windows, glowing in the night.

* * *

The manor held the stale air of a sickroom, a scent Eli recognized from his visits to sanatoria in the West. It was quite unlike what he’d experienced in his last visit; here was the true odor of illness, of atrophy, of death.

The little glass statue in the parlour no longer appeared blue. Perhaps that was due to the quality of light, or lack thereof, streaming through the window. It was lifeless and grey, the flatworm at its gills standing out in sharp relief, looking fatter than before.

Shuddering, Eli made his way through the darkened halls. No candles had been lit tonight by Pellaeon or one of his alleged manservants. He could see the oil paintings staring at him from the walls, but without light, they were little more than shadows to his eyes. 

He did not announce himself until he reached the top floor. His gaze was drawn automatically to the closed door behind which he had first met Thrawn. His mouth ran dry.

“Mr. Pellaeon,” said Eli, and was dismayed to hear how colourless his voice had suddenly become. He edged away from the closed door — the one room in this house he truly knew — and instead twisted the knob of one much closer to him, cracking it open just enough to see that it was empty, sparsely decorated, and covered in dust.

He retreated to the hallway again. His hands were slick inside his leather gloves.

“Mr. Pellaeon—” he started, but that was where the question ended.

There was someone standing behind him. An elusive presence in a terrible miasma of mud and night and ruined earth; something squirming just out of sight, visible only for its incessant motion beneath the muck. He could almost feel that other presence in the ground beneath him, rippling the floorboards, squirming between bare toes. The stench of illness and indignity on his tongue.

_ Coal Miner and Hookworm, _ Eli thought.

He turned and found himself facing Thrawn.

His breath left him in a deceptively measured sigh. “Mr. Pellaeon?” Eli asked. His tone asked the question for him. Silently, Thrawn nodded his head, indicating a door farther down the corridor.

His red gaze was the only source of light in that dark house.

“Lead the way,” said Eli, who suddenly found himself whispering. Thrawn stepped ahead of him, his footsteps muffled on the floorboards. He walked carefully, just to the side of the thin carpet which stretched down the middle of the hall.

_ Why avoid the carpet? _ Eli wondered. Yet he found himself doing it as well, mimicking the other man’s gait, as suddenly the carpeting seemed too thick, too strong, knee-deep in foreign fibers and magnetic in its hold. 

There was an awful noise trapped in Eli’s throat. He didn’t want to think about why it was there. At the door to Pellaeon’s room, he gathered himself, clenching his fingers ‘round the saddle bag handle and relishing the familiar creak of leather on wood.

Like the rest of Lycia House, there was no light in Pellaeon’s room. Eli pushed the door open and glanced inside, his eyes straining, but the most he could make out was the shape of a bed near the wall.

“Fetch a candle, please,” he said to Thrawn, who stood behind him now, the glow from his eyes failing to reach as far as a single yard. “If you could?”

Thrawn’s exit was entirely silent. Eli only knew he had gone by the dimming of those red lights. Carefully, he felt his way through the room, his hands coming down on paneled walls and a bedside table so dark it was almost invisible. There was no chair next to Pellaeon’s bed; indeed, there seemed to be no chair anywhere in the room, nor a desk, nor bookshelves nor wardrobes nor even a vanity.

There was only a mirror on the opposite wall, the bed, and Pellaeon atop it, wrapped in sheets the same grey shade as his face. Eli observed him for a moment, just to verify that his chest was rising and falling as it should; then he crossed to the window, wishing desperately that the moon were on this side of the house, that the stars weren’t covered up by clouds.

He rested his saddle bag on the window sill. A moment later, he saw the reflection of a small, bright flame in the glass, obscuring his dim view of the grounds, and he turned to see Thrawn bending at the waist over Pellaeon’s bed, holding a single lit candle in his hand. 

_ It must be outlandishly hot, _ thought Eli, bemused. He’d been burnt by candle wax at a midnight service in the local kirk one year, as a child; his father had been sitting next to him, holding the mercury glass candlestick in his hand, and when he’d nodded off, his hand had drooped and so had the candle, and all the accumulated wax had poured out of the dome over the candlestick and directly onto Eli’s exposed neck.

Yet Thrawn did not flinch as the wax dribbled over his fingers. He scarcely seemed to notice it. 

Beneath the candlelight, Pellaeon’s eyelids seemed almost transparent. There was a technique Eli had seen before on mummified corpses in Italy which turned eyelids transparent so spectators could see the color of the iris underneath; seeing the same effect here, on a living man, unnerved him.

“Mr. Pellaeon,” he said, “it’s Dr. Vanto. Can you hear me?”

Pellaeon made no response. His pallor was striking, particularly when Eli raised his own brown hand to Pellaeon’s forehead. There was sweat on his brow, dampening his hair. It was beaded on his upper lip, as well; yet Eli could feel no fever.

He was hyper-aware of Thrawn’s presence, and grateful for the bed and the supine patient keeping them apart. As he brushed back Pellaeon’s hair, Thrawn lowered the candle to give him better light. Their hands nearly touched. 

“Leave it on the table, if you please,” said Eli. Quite deliberately, Thrawn affixed the candle instead to a broken shelf which still clung to the wall over Pellaeon’s bed. From there, its light cast dimly over a radius of roughly a yard, illuminating an array of peculiar, paint-stained traveling chests stacked near the wall. They were placed far too close to the bed for comfort; anyone attempting to sleep here would have to first climb over the chests.

Unless, of course, they were carried in and placed on the bed by someone else. 

“How long has he been this way?” Eli asked. Of course, asking Thrawn was as useful as speaking to a wall. Rather than answer Eli’s question, he pulled an enormous traveling chest away from the wall — it was sturdily built and nearly two feet high, Eli noticed, with two quaint doors on the front which opened out, like an oversized jewelry box — and perched on it, legs crossed and hands folded. It was an echo of his posture the first time they’d met, when he’d been the one under examination.

He observed each of Eli’s actions sharply, eyes darting from the doctor to his patient in turn. 

“Days?” Eli asked. He refused to look away from Thrawn until he got his answer. “Hours?”

Minutely, Thrawn nodded.

“You worked fast, then,” Eli said. Thrawn’s prim gaze was locked on Pellaeon; he appeared not to hear Eli’s words. “For Mr. Pellaeon to collapse, and for you to both move him here and also contact the telegram office, all in a matter of hours — you must have worked very fast, indeed,” said Eli.

Thrawn tilted his head toward Pellaeon while his odd, monochrome eyes slid toward Eli in subtle reproach. _ You have a patient to attend, _he seemed to be saying.

Only he _ wasn’t _ saying anything, not really. Eli wrenched open his saddle bag, cursing the broken clasp — it always stuck; he’d been meaning to get it fixed for nearly a year — and picked through the items he’d brought along. Thrawn had said to him, _ I can speak_. He was sure of it. But the dreadful man wasn’t speaking now.

And Eli hadn’t invented it. He wouldn’t doubt himself now. 

He abandoned the saddle bag in a huff, setting it down atop one of the strangely-shaped traveling chests nearby. With gentle fingers, he felt for Pellaeon’s pulse — present, just like his breathing, but hardly ideal — and pried Pellaeon’s paper-thin eyelids apart. His pupils were fixed and dilated; they didn’t flicker; they didn’t focus one whit. 

“Mr. Pellaeon,” said Eli in the loud, clear tones he’d occasionally used in lecture halls. He received no response. “Gilad,” he said instead, also to no effect. He felt Thrawn’s eyes on him and glanced up to scowl at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Well, make yourself useful,” he snapped.

Thrawn held his gaze, his red eyes seeming simultaneously blind and all-seeing. It was impossible to read his face.

Then, without a word — _ of course, without a word _ — he stood and pushed the traveling chest back against the wall, leaving the room in silence. He did not take the candle with him. Last time he was here, Eli had not seen Thrawn move, except to shift positions minutely as he sat on the window seat. Seeing him in motion now, Eli knew that his previous assessment had been correct: Thrawn was not just healthy but fit, as graceful and slender as a dancer, his athleticism apparent in even the smallest of gestures. 

Left alone with Pellaeon, Eli felt a strange mixture of relief and regret.

“Mr. Pellaeon,” he whispered. “We are alone. If this is a farce, I pray you tell me now.”

Pellaeon lay still and silent. His chest rose in a shallow breath; his eyes did not flicker beneath his thin, transparent lids. Eli pulled the sheets back — finer sheets than he’d ever had himself, he noted, though they were only dusty spares — and assessed Pellaeon’s weight and musculature. 

He seemed already to be wasting. Eli squeezed Pellaeon’s upper arm and felt no definition of the bicep underneath his skin, which seemed loose and malleable, like the wax dripping from the candle overhead and staining the wood. He sighed, settling back on his makeshift stool. He extracted a sheet of thick stationery from his saddle bag and, by the light of the candle, wrote out a list of possibilities, of symptoms, of questions to ask. 

It was a long hour before Thrawn returned, but Eli scarcely noticed the time passing by. He contented himself with his list — first making it; then verifying the symptoms; taking Pellaeon’s vitals and adding them to the little slip of paper in his cramped, blotted hand; extrapolating new potential causes from that data. By the time Thrawn returned, Eli’s eyes were burning and the light had burned low.

He glanced up, blinking, dazed. For a moment, the items Thrawn carried were merely blurs.

He’d brought extra candles, Eli realized — with glass holders this time — and he set something large down on one of the traveling chests before placing the candles around the room. There were still wax droplets on Thrawn’s hand, dry now and shining like little white pearls against his blue skin.

“I have some questions for you,” said Eli briskly. The new, pervasive glow of candlelight throughout the room made it easier for him to read his list — and easier, unfortunately, to see Pellaeon’s wan face. “They will be yes-or-no answers only. You may answer them by nodding or shaking your head, like this. Yes—” He tilted his head down to his chest in an exaggerated motion. “—or no.” He shook his head thoroughly, making himself a little dizzy. When that faded, he was chagrined to find Thrawn watching him with a pained look on his face. 

Eli brushed it off. He was accustomed to judgmental looks.

“All the questions regard Mr. Pellaeon,” he said, consulting his list. “Has he suffered from hacking, bloody coughs in the time you’ve known him?”

Thrawn placed the last of his candles on a pewter saucer atop one of the many paint-smudged traveling chests. He struck a new match against his fingernails and held it to the wick until the candle caught flame. 

Almost absently, he nodded.

“Has he complained of pain in his chest?” asked Eli. “Or more specifically, his lungs?”

Thrawn shook the match out and stuck the hot end of it into his mouth before dropping it, with astonishing carelessness, onto the floor. He stepped over it on his way to Pellaeon’s bedside, entangling his long, artistic fingers in Pellaeon’s damp hair. 

Eli tensed, anticipating — for reasons he couldn’t identify, could scarcely recognize — an act of violence. But Thrawn was gentle, almost affectionate.

Almost sad.

“Thrawn?” he prompted.

Thrawn nodded. Eli checked that symptom off his list.

“And fatigue?” he asked. “Has he complained of fatigue?”

Was it possible he saw the ghost of a smile on Thrawn’s lips as he nodded? It could have been nothing more than a crossing of shadows from the candles flickering nearby, each of them playing over Thrawn’s face at different angles. 

This question, Thrawn did not bother to answer. Perhaps that was because Eli had witnessed this symptom himself, at his last visit. He combed Pellaeon’s hair back with his fingers, smoothing it down where it stuck up, tucking a loose strand behind Pellaeon’s ear. Then, without glancing at Eli, he turned and retrieved the large object he’d placed on a traveling chest.

It was an eight-quart jar, Eli realized, filled three-quarters of the way up with murky-looking water. Inside that dark water, something was wiggling; a dozen fat leeches, their bodies thick and wet. The water had clearly not been changed in at least a week; from the other side of the bed, Eli could see white flakes floating alongside the leeches — remnants of their skin, sloughed off naturally as the days went by.

“I don’t believe in bloodletting,” Eli said, the words sounding hollow to his ears. He had never before met a patient who kept his own leeches. “I believe Mr. Pellaeon has consumption, sir. He will be best served by periods of rest, either in a sanatorium or here at home. The fresh air and sun will do him good.”

Thrawn stared at Eli, the jar of leeches resting, absolutely still, in his hands. The water line was as straight as the edge of Pellaeon’s bedside table; it did not waver one bit. 

He seemed unimpressed with Eli’s diagnosis. There was an almost severe look of disapproval on his face.

“Bloodletting has no discernible effect on consumptives,” Eli explained. He wanted to fold his list into a small square and tuck it away, either in his pocket or in his saddle bag, but instead he clutched it tightly in his hands, leaving little damp spots wherever his fingers touched it. “It’s pure superstition.”

Thrawn eyed him a moment longer, then quirked his eyebrow in an expression Eli couldn’t quite identify. It felt like dismissal. He brought the jar around to Eli’s side of the bed and Eli stepped away; he had no particular desire to touch it.

But Thrawn walked right past him, placing the jar instead on Pellaeon’s bedside table. There, he unscrewed the jar and watched as the leeches leapt at the surface, struggling to escape. The water was too low for them to reach the mouth of the jar.

“What do you feed them?” Eli asked. The words left his mouth without his permission, and he flushed when Thrawn glanced at him over his shoulder. “I’ve never kept them,” Eli said. “You don’t — that is to say, you must feed them mealworms, surely? Or pond snails, perhaps?”

_ Not blood, _he thought, but this at least he was capable of holding back.

_ Not blood, _Thrawn assured him, looking away.

Eli stepped back, his shoulders stiff in fear, his mouth suddenly glued shut. He could feel his eye twitching frantically, out of his control; when he looked at his hands, they were shaking. The wave of nausea and dizziness which overtook him was all too familiar now. After a full month of dealing with it, the intensity fading over time, its return felt like a most unwelcome kiss.

Unconcerned, Thrawn turned his back to Eli, and it took Eli a moment to see past the outraged pounding of his heart, to realize Thrawn was nosing through his saddle bag. Before he could find his voice again, Thrawn had located a forceps and removed it, closing the bag without any trouble from the broken clasp.

“Speak to me again,” said Eli, his voice an unrecognizable rasp. “I know I heard you.”

Thrawn did not deign to look his way. He dipped the forceps into his murky jar, fishing for a leech. The one he came away with was fat and dark, as long as Thrawn’s thumb and twice as thick. It curled in on itself when exposed to the light.

“I _ heard _ you,” Eli said, urgently this time. “In my head. In _ English, _ plain as my own hand.”

The short stump of a candle over Pellaeon’s head flickered, its flame finally fluttering out. Unperturbed, Thrawn used the forceps to guide the leech to Pellaeon’s exposed neck. 

“You shouldn’t—” Eli started. He found himself suddenly unfrozen, his hands no longer trembling, his nausea almost entirely gone. Without glancing at Eli, Thrawn reached into his pocket with his free hand and held out two items which he must have nicked from the saddle bag.

One was a tortoiseshell case containing two small thumb lancets, which Eli felt no need to defend, though they _ were _ commonly used for bloodletting, and he suspected Thrawn was accusing him of lying, or hypocrisy. The other…

“That’s a calomel purgative,” Eli said, his face turning hot. “It’s a mere curiosity. I don’t use it on my patients, I assure you. Only as a conversation piece — it’s loaded with mercury.”

Thrawn seemed amused, disbelieving. Perhaps he suspected that Eli had never shared the purgative with anyone before; certainly never with a fellow doctor. Perhaps he knew how many people calomel purgatives had killed. Perhaps he could see Eli sitting by the fire with the purgative in hand, admiring how it glowed in the light. 

The leech on Pellaeon’s neck was throbbing as it ate its fill.

Eli had been called a leech before. It had been hurled at him as an insult by a wealthy man on his deathbed — one of his first patients when he opened his practice. The man had been frightened and small, lashing out, and the word hadn’t affected Eli in the slightest.

Still, he remembered it, and the sight of a leech on Pellaeon’s neck made him feel sick. He took the purgative and lancet case from Thrawn’s open hand and stashed them back in his saddle bag. 

“Consumption,” he said, though it was certainly futile to try and convince Thrawn now, “is not caused by an imbalance of humours or impure blood. That’s why blood-letting in this case is useless, sir. New research indicates it may be caused by a contagious bacterium, perhaps located in tubercules within the lungs.”

Thrawn was gentle and unhurried as he removed the leech, though he was quick to cover the wound. Eli watched as a bright spot of blood seeped through the white cloth Thrawn had placed on Pellaeon’s skin. 

_ Speak to me, _ Eli said.

The voice in his head, light and melodic, said, _ You think his blood is pure? _

Thrawn’s red eyes bored into Eli’s, the forceps in his wax-stained hand, that blood-fat leech squirming between the steel arms. His other hand stayed where it was, pressing down on the white cloth which, aside from the red spot in the middle, was nearly the same color now as Pellaeon’s face. 

_ You’re certain of that? _Thrawn said. His voice in Eli’s head almost felt like an echo. There was something beneath it; a shadow, like a dream. A cultured voice almost identical to Thrawn’s, repeating the words in tandem.

On the bed, though he was lying utterly still, Pellaeon’s nose twitched. 

* * *

He spent the night at Lycia House. There seemed little else to do; by the time he cleaned Pellaeon’s wound and saw to it that the blood had clotted, the night had edged into early morning, and it was raining lightly outside, and it was far too dark to ride home. 

Thrawn, ever silent, offered him nightclothes and showed him to a guest room, where the sheets were clean and free of dust, and where the room itself was filled with furniture rather than an endless supply of old traveling chests. Eli declined, intending (initially) to stay vigil by Pellaeon’s side.

Halfway through the night, when his eyelids were drooping, he kept himself awake by opening the traveling chest on which he sat. It was filled with glass vials, each of them containing a minute amount of dried pigment. Eli had seen similar pigments on a smaller scale in the field easels and Pochade Boxes of artists painting _ en plein air. _When he was a boy, he’d watched an oil painter — a scruffy, unshaven man — mix pigment like this, which he’d ground himself, with linseed oil. 

Nowadays, practically everyone used paint stored wet in plastic tubes. Eli hadn’t seen dried pigment in years. He tapped the vials so that the pigment gathered near the top and uncorked it, dipping his finger inside. His fingertip came away coated in a familiar deep, dark blue.

Eli’s mind seemed to be eating itself. He was too exhausted from the long day — from the strange sights — to organize his thoughts. He’d blown out most of the candles in the room, leaving only the one on Pellaeon’s bedside table, next to a book of matches Thrawn must have left behind in case Eli changed his mind and decided to re-light them. As he stood up, he couldn’t tell for a moment whether the room’s natural darkness or his own dizziness was obscuring his vision. 

He needed to sleep, if he could. There would be no benefit to Pellaeon if Eli slept at his side; he took the candle in its pewter saucer and tucked the book of matches into his pocket before wandering into the hall.

The candelabras bracketed to the walls were empty; perhaps Thrawn had stolen from them to light Pellaeon’s room, or perhaps they had always been that way. It had been daytime during Eli’s last visit, and he couldn’t remember whether they’d been there or not. The guest room Thrawn had showed him earlier was to the right, closer to the stairs.

He felt almost like he was floating as he walked to it. When he stopped, it took him a moment to realize he was not standing outside a door.

He lifted the candle. The darkness before him opened up, revealed itself, exposed the flesh-toned _ something _ wiggling in the shadows.

_ Coal Miner and Hookworm. _For a moment — just a moment — Eli thought he could see beneath the black oil paint to what lurked just below. 

His eyes burned; he blinked, then squeezed them closed, swimming in the dark static which hid under his eyelids. His headache was back, throbbing at his temples.

_ You’re lost, _said a voice in his head. It was polite, dispassionate.

“No,” said Eli aloud. Eyes still closed, unwilling to see that ghastly painting again, he felt his way down the hall to his door. When he opened it, he found the room already lit in a soft, warm glow. The candles near the bed were still tall, with precious little wax pooled underneath them. Either they’d just been placed there, or they’d been recently changed.

Eli didn’t care to find out which. Thrawn had offered him nightclothes and Eli had declined, but there they were, folded neatly at the foot of the bed. He lifted the corner of the folded bundle and held it up just high enough to see that the garments were out of fashion and too large for him; he suspected they’d once belonged to Pellaeon, and had spent many years in a closet or trunk, protected by mothballs. 

Which trunk, in which room? Was it the same room where Thrawn kept his leeches? Were there traveling chests there, too, filled with dried pigment which hadn’t been touched in years?

There was no discernible signature on _ Coal Miner and Hookworm. _Had Pellaeon painted it himself? When?

Before Thrawn?

After?

Head throbbing, Eli gathered the bundle of nightclothes into his arms and dumped them on a nearby chair. There was a basin of clean water waiting for him on a vanity next to the chair; when he peered into it, he saw violet petals floating on the surface, lending an air of fragrance to the room. The sight nearly made him ill. 

He gripped the edge of the vanity and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he calmed himself, he could just barely stand to trail his fingers through the water. It was pleasantly cool, soothing against his skin.

When he finally crawled into bed, he was still wearing the clothes he’d come to Lycia House in. His jacket was draped over the chair; his shoes had been kicked off and lay, one on its side, on the floor. 

He fell asleep and forgot to blow the candles out.

* * *

That night he dreamed he was spreading laudanum over his gums. No matter how much he used, it never seemed to affect him. Soon, the bottle was empty, and he needed it filled for his saddle bag. 

It finally hit him when he settled a winter cloak over his shoulders and headed for the apothecary. Outside, the moon was high and the ground was covered in snow so thick and fresh he couldn’t walk over it. He had to plow his way through instead, shoveling as much of the snow out of his way as he could with gloved hands.

The laudanum warped his vision, muted his mind. He needed to get to the apothecary before it closed. It did not occur to him that no apothecary was open this late at night; he _ needed _ to get there, it was imperative. Yet the snow blotted out his sense of direction, erased all landmarks — and his gums ached, and his arms were sore from shoveling, and his legs began to tremble.

And then, as he was about to give up, his hands struck something solid buried in the snow. He grabbed at it by reflex — black cloth, unfamiliar, homespun. 

And underneath that, blue skin, uncommonly cold.

_ Pellaeon, _Eli said. He scraped the snow away with his hands — it was starting to solidify, like a crust of ice — and saw blue fingers curling in the sea of white. Blue like frostbite, blue like gangrene, blue like death.

He grasped the hand. It warmed to him; the fingers twitched against his; the person in the snow grasped Eli’s hand in turn and there they stayed, warm amidst the blizzard, with Eli’s teeth twinging in his mouth and his vision scrambled, with Pellaeon drowning, crushed by snow.

He quested in the snow and found blue-black hair, a noble face, eyes closed. Waiting.

_ Mr. Pellaeon, _ Eli said, over and over again. _ Mr. Pellaeon, it’s me. I’m getting you out. _

_ You’re safe. _

* * *

When he awoke it was light outside and there was a soft, almost pleasant ache in his jaw; he’d been clenching it in his sleep again, grinding his teeth.

There’d been something wrong with that dream, he realized, a small detail that was out of place, but he couldn’t decide what it was. Perhaps it was the laudanum use; he’d tried it, once, as a student, but there had been no pleasant effect whatsoever. He’d never given the drug any thought since, at least not in the recreational sense. He’d certainly never dreamt of it. 

The sunlight streaming through his window was pale and cool — not yet noon, then. Outside, there was a thin crust of snow on the ground which seemed to be there only to mock Eli for his strange dream. He scratched his neck, felt that the top button of his shirt had come off in his sleep, and scowled.

He could see the stable from his window; in the daylight, it was clearly in disrepair and he almost regretted leaving his horse in it the night before. Beyond the stable were the extensive grounds of Lycia House, filled with wood thickets and overgrown fens. There were weather-eroded stones, large enough to be visible from Eli’s window, on the edge of the meadow — perhaps a family plot.

It was too cold for violets, wasn’t it? He couldn’t be sure, as he’d never grown them himself, but he hadn’t seen any growing wild alongside the road as he went about his rounds, and it was late in the season. The petals in his washbasin must have been dried. 

And the fragrance was choking him. He padded over to the basin, still soft from sleep, and plucked the petals out one by one, trying not to think of forceps and leeches. He placed them on a hand-towel while he washed his face, so they wouldn’t dry against the varnish. The candles on his bedside table and vanity had melted and were now nothing more than hardened puddles of wax, filling their saucers. 

He patted the sheets down, feeling for his missing button. When that search yielded no return, he knelt beside the bed and looked underneath it. The floor there was utterly clean — no dust bunnies, no cobwebs, and certainly no missing buttons. 

He stood up again, leaned over to check beneath his pillow, and watched as a drop of blood fell from his nose and splattered square in the middle of the white pillowcase. Eli froze, momentarily thrown off by the sight. When he lifted a hand to his nose and found it bleeding — lightly — he was still unsettled. 

He’d never been one to get nosebleeds. In fact, if he discounted the few times he’d been punched in schoolyard fights, his nose had never bled at all. 

Stress, he told himself. Or overwork, or nerves. It was common enough for him to dismiss it; the blood-flow stopped mere seconds later, when he pressed the hand towel to his nose. Overall he felt terrible — stale from a night spent in the previous day’s clothes (clothes he’d worn on his long walk into the countryside and back, which now seemed like it had happened years ago), from his meager bath in the washbasin, from the exhausting nature of a bedside vigil, however quickly it had been abandoned.

A floorboard creaked in the hall.

It was time he left.

* * *

He made his way through sunlit halls without being accosted. When he arrived at Pellaeon’s sickroom, he found the other man was still unresponsive, the wound on his neck now bruised. Eli checked his vitals, taking note of the data on the twice-folded piece of paper from the night before. In the light of day, without any flickering candles, Pellaeon looked almost normal — pale, of course, but not in any real danger.

Eli sighed, running a hand over his face, and glanced at the mirror across the room. He was certain he looked worse than Pellaeon at the moment, but the mirror was angled downward toward the bed, and from Eli’s seat, he couldn’t see himself in the reflection at all. Only Pellaeon, somber and peaceful in his bed.

He would have to be fed today, if he didn’t wake. Eli considered this solemnly; he’d not thought to bring a feeding tube along with him. There was one in his office, which he’d only had occasion to use twice in his career: once on a visit to an asylum and once on a hunger-striking prisoner at the local gaol, but never on a patient. The best course of action would be to return to town and fetch it — and a change of clothes, of course — rather than attempt to force liquids down Pellaeon’s throat. 

He resisted the urge to make another list. He was gathering the contents of his saddle bag, his mind already far away from Lycia House, when the door creaked. Eli glanced up in time to see Thrawn nudging the door open with his shoulder, hands occupied by a washbasin which was still letting of steam.

Thrawn met Eli’s eyes briefly, brows twitching in silent acknowledgement; his gaze flickered down to Eli’s collar and the missing button, but he gave no discernible reaction to that. He deposited the washbasin on Pellaeon’s bedside table — wisps of vapor rose from it to cover Thrawn’s expression — and exited the room again while Eli watched, returning expediently with more items: a hand towel much like the one in Eli’s room, an ivory-handled shaving brush, a straight razor and bench strop attached to an exquisite piece of hand-carved maple, and a puck of soap inside a scuttle. 

It was no mystery, at least, what he was up to. After last night, that was almost a relief. Eli leaned against the window sill, his eyelids heavy, and watched as Thrawn dipped the shaving brush into the wash basin, wetting the bristles. He swept it over the puck of soap — floral-scented, Eli noticed, though it was rather subtle — with a brisk rotation of his wrist, until the soap began to froth.

It was a fine utensil, Eli thought — certainly finer than the old Rooney brush he’d inherited from his father. The bristles looked to be authentic badger fur, possibly harvested from the pelt of a beast Pellaeon himself had hunted down. Thrawn, his back to Eli, placed his fingers under Pellaeon’s chin, gently tilting his face toward the light.

Overnight, Pellaeon had grown an impressive amount of white whiskers. Eli watched, eyes narrowed, as Thrawn lathered Pellaeon’s face with shaving soap, one hand on Pellaeon’s cheek and the other holding the brush like an artist bent over his latest painting, treating him so gingerly Eli could almost believe that Pellaeon was merely asleep, that Thrawn was trying not to wake him. 

“I’m going back to town for supplies,” said Eli as Thrawn honed the razor. He received no answer, neither verbal nor mental. When Thrawn had finished with the strop, tucking it away between the bedside table and the wall, Eli risked a step forward to look more carefully at the soap — homemade, he suspected, with none of the harshness of lye nor the runny, incohesive quality of animal fat he could detect in the poorly-made soap he bought in town. The puck had been near-white when Thrawn carried it in, but now, fully frothed, it was a pale orange-pink that reminded Eli of the evening sun.

Thrawn applied the edge of the straight razor to Pellaeon’s jawline, his touch light, his features strained in concentration.

Eli couldn’t look away. He forced himself to take a step back, reaching out until the tips of his fingers brushed his saddle bag. The familiar feeling of old leather and the worn wooden handle sucked him in, pulled his attention away from the intimate ritual before him.

With slow, gentle strokes, Thrawn shaved Pellaeon’s face, leaving no nicks and no inflammation that Eli could see. The room was filled with nothing but the soft whispering sound of steel against skin; every move Thrawn made was careful — and not just careful, but caring — and not just caring, but tender. It made for an almost indecent display, especially with a guest like Eli, a practical stranger, in the room.

In time, Thrawn finished his work, though even Eli could see how he lingered. He cleaned the razor in the washbasin, dried it, and set it aside, all without taking his eyes from Pellaeon’s face. He wiped the remnant of shaving soap away from Pellaeon’s now-smooth cheeks with the hand towel; Pellaeon’s glorious mustache had been left perfectly intact.

Eli expected Thrawn to turn his attention away from Pellaeon now; this did not happen. Instead, without a backward glance, Thrawn perched himself lightly on the edge of Pellaeon’s bed, his hip brushing Pellaeon’s, one leg tucked beneath him and the other dangling off the side, his foot barely brushing the floor. He stared down into the supine gentleman’s closed eyes with an intensity Eli had never seen.

_ Thrawn? _said Eli.

There was no answer. He couldn’t be sure that he’d been heard. He held the saddle bag in front of him, both hands clasped on the handle. His inner temperature suddenly seemed dysregulated — uncommonly chill, but without the accompaniment of gooseflesh or shivers, like this was how he was always meant to be.

When he spoke, he spoke to the floor.

“I’m going to town for supplies,” he repeated, voice low. “We’ll have to force-feed him if he remains unconscious; I’ve a feeding tube at my practice, and the supplies for a milk-based supplement which will satisfy his nutritional needs.”

Silently, Thrawn raised his hand, fingers brushing against the angry wound on Pellaeon’s neck. The bruise there was so blue it almost matched his skin. Eli could see the look in Thrawn’s eyes, though he didn’t wish to identify it. It was something focused and stubborn. He could almost describe it as angry, but ‘angry’ was too colourless a word.

“A change of clothes, I should think,” said Eli. “Personal effects — and I’ll need to leave a notice on my practice door.”

He waited for an answer and heard nothing; he couldn’t bear to look up and study Thrawn’s face. Not while he was staring at Pellaeon so nakedly. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the floor, where all he could see was his own shoes. 

The steam from the washbasin seemed to be blowing his way. He imagined he could identify the faint, fragrant smell — wild violets.

“I’d best be going,” Eli said.

Thrawn did not reach out to stop him as he went. He made his escape from the sick room without incident; if Thrawn heard Eli’s succinct farewell, he did not show it. He didn’t even twitch; his eyes remained fixed on Pellaeon, his hand turned palm up against his neck, knuckles brushing against the bruise. In the doorway, Eli’s throat tightened with anticipation; he felt like a puppet at the far end of its strings, waiting for its master to snap it back into place.

He passed into the hall unharmed. After a steadying breath, Eli made his way toward the stairs with one hand holding tightly to the saddle bag and the other worrying at his button-less collar. He kept his gaze locked firmly ahead of him, refusing to look at the paintings and medical illustrations to his sides._ Coal Miner and Hookworm _ was a dark blot in the corner of his eye as he passed it; he imagined the loam of it expanding from the frame, grasping for him, sticky black fingers pulling him into the mud.

Beyond that painting was the stairs and the sculpture in the parlour, shining a clear blue again in the sunlight, the flatworm in its gills invisible. The front door was propped open with an enormous, empty vase, allowing a cold autumn breeze to fill the lower floor. On the threshold, Eli hesitated, his toes on the hard-packed ground, his heels on the wooden floorboards.

He hadn’t expected to leave here, he realized. The sunlight on his face felt unreal; the crisp air against his skin was like a gentle bite. The ride home would be brittle and bracing — and he couldn’t wait for it, could already feel the breeze pushing back his hair and turning his nose red. Helminth would simply adore it once he saddled her up; she was young still, and could never resist a crisp fall day or an opportunity for a trot.

He could hear the wind whistling through the cracks in the old, decrepit stable walls, a loose door swinging on its hinges. As he walked toward it, feeling new and rejuvenated and only a little melancholy from his strange farewell, he pricked his ears in anticipation of the sound of his horse inside, nickering and stomping her hooves.

Instead, he approached the stable and smelled death in the November air. 

Eli came to a halt, his body going cold again like it had in Pellaeon’s sick room. No gooseflesh, no shivers. Just cold.

The stable door was unbarred. Inside, it was dark and musty, exuding the foul scent of stale straw and decaying meat and the lingering odor of horse manure, though the only horse inside was Eli’s own mare. He approached cautiously, walking on the outside edges of his feet to muffle his footsteps, a strategic choice he made without thinking.

Crouching in the entrance of the stable, he could see Helminth lying dead on her side, outside the stall he’d left her in. He stepped forward and the shadows jumped to meet him; he stopped several feet away from the dead horse, the back of his neck tingling.

Was he alone in there? It was too dark to tell. There was a void in every closed stall so complete it could hide anything, even Thrawn’s red eyes. There were no visible wounds on Helminth’s body — at least, none he could see from so far away — but her eyes were glassy and staring and her lips were lax, her mouth open. 

And something was moving inside.

Without turning his back on the corpse, Eli retreated, his footsteps rapid and loud. Maggots, he told himself frantically, or simply a great swarm of black flies. Or even a rat which had crawled into Helminth’s throat and was eating her tongue, making it jump against her teeth.

It _ couldn’t _ be leeches. That was one option which simply wasn’t possible; Eli would accept that a pinworm infection had gone unnoticed, that the parasites had migrated unseen from the mucosa of Helminth’s intestine straight up her throat before he accepted what his eyes told him was true, before he believed the undulating mass of dark, wet leeches he’d seen inside the horse’s mouth. 

On the lawn of Lycia House, facing the trees and fen and Pellaeon’s weather-worn family plot, hugging himself tightly, Eli said: _ It can’t be leeches. _

Breathing quickly, shallowly, his throat aching and cold: _ It can’t be leeches. _

Eyes closed, lips bitten, trying not to scream: 

_ Not leeches. _


	3. Chapter 3

He was determined to spend the rest of the day exactly where he was, sitting on a boulder outside the stable with his back to Lycia House. There was no longer any hope of visiting his practice; other than Helminth’s body, the stable was empty, and in any case, the remnants of a cart he’d found outside no longer had four wheels.

All Eli could do was sit, his arms around his knees, and glower out at the thin-trunked trees bordering Pellaeon’s property. He couldn’t summon the energy to walk all twenty miles into town, and he certainly couldn’t summon the energy to re-enter Lycia House. It was out of the question. In his mind’s eye, he saw _ Coal Miner and Hookworm _looming at him from the wall, so large it could swallow him whole. He was sucked into it, drowning in the mud; he could taste a hint of copper underneath the overwhelming dirt.

And when he closed his eyes, he could see Thrawn’s blue skin and glowing eyes, could hear him calling for Eli wordlessly, a sensation no more tangible than an echo.

Far better to stay out here, Eli told himself, where he could content himself with watching the fallen leaves jump and twirl in the breeze, where the worst he had to contend with was an occasional change of wind bringing the smell of Halminth’s body back to him. 

His limbs were heavy, his skin sticking to his ribs in a persistent reminder that he had not eaten anything since yesterday afternoon, before he’d gone to his appointment in the countryside. There was a staticky headache roiling behind his eyes, shooting off occasional needles directly into his brain. 

He could walk to town, he told himself. He could be free of this entire situation — but only if he refueled first. If necessary, he could eat inside Lycia House and make the journey home tonight, by the light of the moon.

He turned his head back toward the house and felt his stiff, unbuttoned collar poke him in the neck, irritating the tender skin there. He shook his head, eyes closed, until the feeling went away, and then opened them again. It took a moment for his vision to settle.

Was there someone watching him from his own bedroom window? Or had he only imagined it during that brief second when his eyes were watery and his vision blurred? He shook his head again, this time staring at his knees and ignoring the house. 

There was a brush of air against his shoulder, as though someone had snuck up behind him, their presence unannounced. Perhaps when he turned his head, he would see Helminth standing there, alive and well. Perhaps she would open her mouth to lick his palm and he would see leeches squirming between her teeth, eating her tongue.

He was certain he could feel a warm, broad hand on his shoulder, long, clever fingers dancing over his skin. He kept his eyes squeezed closed and told himself: live, healthy fingers. Not dead fingers. Fingers turned red from the cold. A normal hand connected to a healthy man, a man with an unscarred tongue fully capable of forming words, of talking to him, of offering him a way out.

The pressure from the hand increased into a gentle, comforting pulse. Perhaps he simply imagined that those fingers had turned cold and limp against him, leaving a clammy feeling and a stench like pond water on his skin. Perhaps he imagined that the nails were sharp and thin like needles digging into him, slicing him straight to the bone.

He turned his head, eyes open. 

No one was there.

* * *

There was no food in Lycia House. Eli discovered this at dusk, when the temperature dropped so low he thought he might freeze to his spot on the boulder. He came inside to find the house as dark as the night before; the only sound was his own footsteps as he stomped circulation back into his toes. 

With numb arms wrapped around his ribs, Eli made his way to the kitchen. The stove in the corner was cold to the touch, the smell of coal so faint it was almost nonexistent. He laid a palm on the cool surface, eyebrows furrowed, and then crossed to the oak-paneled icebox nearby.

Its shelves were empty, the tin inside stained with oxidization. The cork lining had been gnawed almost completely away by rats. Standing on his tiptoes, Eli slid open the ice tray at the top of the cabinet and found it empty. He ran his finger over the inside walls; they were dry.

Nonplussed, he moved from the icebox to the butler’s pantry, which he quickly discovered was nothing more than an old fashioned buttry. This, too, was empty. There were broken wooden crates scattered on the shelves; an empty, molded piece of canvas — perhaps it had been a flour bag once — had been stepped on so many times that it now seemed permanently attached to the floor. Thick layers of dust lay over the shelves and clouded the air, threatening to choke Eli should he investigate further.

Mouth and nose covered by one pale hand, Eli backed out and closed the door. He leaned against the icebox, blinking hazily, trying to make sense of the barren room.

It must have been a month or more since Pellaeon had sent someone to market — or gone himself, more likely, considering the lack of servant quarters in the house. The cart outside, with its missing wheels, and the derelict, empty stables might suggest an even longer period of starvation, but this was something Eli’s brain simply could not accept. 

A delivery boy must bring foodstuffs monthly, Eli concluded, and this deduction at least served to brighten his spirits in a marginal way. If this was true, the next delivery period must be soon — possibly even tomorrow — and when the boy appeared, Eli would have both food and a method to return home. In the meantime, he could certainly find something to eat in the root cellar.

The trapdoor to the cellar was in the middle of the kitchen, visible only due to the heavy brass ring which served as a handle. Eli pulled it open with some difficulty and edged his way down the ladder into the dark warily, half-certain that door would fall and crush his hands or skull at any moment.

The root cellar was even darker than the house. Eli paused halfway down the wooden ladder, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and then gingerly proceeded to the hard-packed floor. It was the sort of cold, dark place he’d always avoided as a child, terrified to walk barefoot over the dirt in case of parasites. The ceiling above him was just as bad, made of thick, black earth, with the translucent red outer layers of autumn onions shining through below the surface. 

Briefly, he wondered who had planted them there — Pellaeon or Thrawn? But there were more pressing things on his mind than a few overwintering onions. Stacked against the walls were two rows of barrels, and a quick inspection showed that each of them was halfway filled with vegetables. There was a sparse dozen of dusty jars on wooden shelves built into one side of the cellar as well; Eli grabbed one and wiped the layer of dirt off the label, squinting to read it. 

It was some sort of fruit preserve, most likely — he couldn’t for the life of him make out Pellaeon’s handwriting. If it _ was _ Pellaeon’s writing. He tucked the jar under his arm and grabbed a handful of runty round potatoes and carrots from another barrel, where they were mixed together haphazardly. Another barrel offered up a true blessing: strips of salt herring ready to eat.

The climb back up the ladder was slow and clumsy, with only one hand free. When he reached the top, Eli opened his arm as far as he could without dropping the jar, allowing each of the root vegetables to tumble onto the kitchen floor. He pulled himself out of the cellar, still eyeing the trapdoor warily. The dust from the cellar seemed to be circulating in his lungs, drawing loud, irritated coughs out of him as he gathered up his bounty and transported it to the stove. 

Christ, he was hungry enough to eat it all raw. 

It took him five minutes of shaky-fingered searching to locate a kitchen knife both clean and sharp enough to slice through the potato skins. He used the edge of it to shred the outer layer of the carrots, washed them in cold water from the sink, and chewed on them even as he set to work on the rest of his bounty. 

The inside of the potatoes was a rusty brownish-red — an unhealthy color if Eli ever saw one. He shut down his taste buds with a supreme mental effort and ate them anyway, heating them in the old coal stove and dipping them in the unidentified fruit preserves to mask the foul taste. They were barely soft enough to eat, still acidic from under-cooking, but he couldn’t stand to wait any longer.

He devoured the salt herring. He did not bother to pick his way around the bones; they crunched between his teeth and stabbed at his gums, and then he swallowed them, barely noticed and unacknowledged. When that was gone, he returned to the potato skins he’d abandoned on the oak table and ate those, too, using them (and, when they were gone, the knife) to scrape what remained of the fruit preserves out of the jar. 

Later, he would question himself: had the herring been whole when he ate it, or had it already been stripped down to edible, sparse fillets? Had there been scales sticking to his tongue, cutting his fingers as he ate?

Had he eaten the eyes?

He couldn’t remember, and he didn’t have the stomach yet to go back down to the root cellar and inspect the other herrings in their barrel to extrapolate about the one he’d eaten. His mouth felt gummy, oily, unpleasant; his stomach felt swollen. The chill was still upon him, and he didn’t know what he wished for more: to find his bed and fall into oblivion with possible rescue in the morning, or to flee now on foot, into the dark trees.

He paused on the stairs, hunched over the banister with his arms resting on the sleek, polished wood. Of course, he couldn’t flee; he had sworn an oath, and his conscience would not allow him to abandon a patient, especially not one so ill as Mr. Pellaeon. Worse, his curiosity would not allow him to leave either; it held him fast, like a moth pinned inside a frame and hung upon the wall. 

And his curiosity, loath as he was to admit it, did not rest on Mr. Pellaeon. It rested purely on the strange, impossible figure who called himself — or _ allegedly _ called himself — Thrawn.

Weary as he was, he had only one conscionable option.

He checked in on Pellaeon, the carrots and potatoes sitting cold and undigested inside him, the herring and fruit preserves forming an impenetrable slime which coated the lining of his stomach. The room was dark as ever, the paint-stained travel chests pulled away from the wall so that they covered the floor between the door and Pellaeon’s bed, almost like a barrier. Eli could think of no good reason for Thrawn to move them and to leave them scattered haphazardly about; he could only imagine the other man searching through them, examining the dried pigments inside.

Pellaeon’s narrow bed was more than occupied; Pellaeon himself lay small and white beneath the sheets. Beside him, as still as a corpse, was Thrawn, his shoulder and hip square against Pellaeon’s, his eyes closed. 

Eli hesitated in the doorway, reluctant to weave his way through that maze of travel chests, reluctant to approach the bed, reluctant to reach over Thrawn to take Pellaeon’s vitals. The door clicked shut behind him, blocking out all light from the hall and leaving only the moon for Eli to see by; a second later, Thrawn’s eyes opened sluggishly, showing slits of red. 

Slowly — _ strangely _ slowly, Eli thought — those eyes turned and pinned him to the wall. 

“I’m checking on Mr. Pellaeon,” said Eli, his own voice sounding stiff and choked to his ears. He waited, irrationally, for a response, and when he remembered that Thrawn was — well, that Thrawn was whatever he was; mute or unsociable or simply alien — he scrambled for something else to say, anything to end the thick, humid silence in the room. “Has he eaten today?”

Thrawn stared at him a moment, unblinking, then raised himself up on his elbow and peered down into Pellaeon’s face. Perhaps it was Eli’s imagination that Thrawn moved with difficulty, that even this slow, uncomplicated maneuver seemed to strain him. Certainly it was uncharacteristic from what he’d seen of Thrawn thus far; gone were the athleticism and grace which Eli had witnessed the day before. 

Perhaps he was fatigued. Perhaps he, like Eli, had slept poorly and eaten little over the last two days. 

Thrawn’s face was so close to Pellaeon’s now that their noses were nearly touching. An uncomfortable sensation fluttered in Eli’s chest and up his esophagus, threatening to steal his breath. He averted his eyes, reasoning with himself that there was nothing amiss here and simultaneously incapable of watching any longer. 

There was a type of melancholy in Thrawn’s face which Eli had never seen before and could not bear to look at it, mixed as it was with unmistakable hunger. Yet there was nowhere else he could look. When he looked into the mirror on the wall opposite Pellaeon’s bed, the angle erased both inhabitants of the bed and showed Eli only his own wan face. When he stared into the darkness in the corner of the room, he saw Helminth lying dead on the stable floor with wolves at her throat and maggots squirming inside freshly-made pockets in her rotting hide. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing the image to fade away.

“Has he eaten today?” he asked again. He darted a quick glance in Thrawn’s direction, just to see if there might be an answer, and caught Thrawn sinking back onto the mattress, his elbow resting gently on Pellaeon’s wasted chest, his hands covering his eyes. “If he hasn’t—” Eli started. 

The offer to prepare a thin gruel for Pellaeon died in his throat as Eli envisioned the empty buttry, the hard, cruel vegetables in the root cellar, the arduous, almost futile process of coaxing soup down an unconscious man’s throat. He opened his mouth and felt his lips trembling. He pictured the leeches squirming between Helminth’s teeth and closed his mouth again. He tried to imagine himself sitting on the side of the bed where Thrawn was, leaning over Pellaeon, parting his lips with his fingers and spooning the soup into the dark, wet cave of his mouth.

“My horse has died,” said Eli.

It wasn’t what he meant to say. He hadn’t given himself permission to say anything at all. His voice was plaintive, shaking, unrecognizable. Across the room, Thrawn’s hands went still, no longer massaging his temples or rubbing at his eyes. His elbow shifted slightly, displaced by the minute expansion of Pellaeon’s chest as he breathed, and finally Thrawn uncovered his face to stare inscrutably at Eli. 

He wanted to ask if the delivery boy would be there tomorrow with fresh stock for the larder. He wanted to ask if there were other stables on the property somewhere filled with strong, healthy horses. He wanted to ask where the candles were kept so he could light the house himself, since no one else would.

Instead, he said: “I could find no wounds on her. She simply died where she stood.” 

And Thrawn stared at him, silent as ever, his lips a thin line, and Eli blurted out, “She was too young to simply die like that. I foaled her myself two years ago, in the spring.” 

And Thrawn kept staring, so Eli clenched his fists, his jaw tight and said, with all the weight of accusation making his mind heavy, “I’m _ stuck _ here.”

But it came out as a question, not a statement, and Thrawn just nodded. For the first time since they’d met, there was an expression on his face so plain that Eli could read it without even an ounce of concentration: commiseration, empathy, comfort. A face that seemed to say, _ I understand completely. My horse has died, too. _

Suddenly, Eli could no longer stand the sick-room. He could see Pellaeon breathing, the evidence of life plain to see, yet the air seemed thick with death, with mourning. He backed away, feet numb and heavy, images of Helminth vibrating and turning to static just behind his eyes. 

He reached his bedroom without even registering _ Coal Miner and Hookworm _as he passed it. There was a metallic taste on his tongue, saliva pooling in his mouth. Bile fighting to be let out.

_ Vile humours, _Eli thought with something near to hysteria. He wrenched his window open, leaving fingerprints on the hard, creeping frost which coated the glass, and bent his head out into the night air. Mouth open, waiting to vomit, he could feel the cold biting at his ears and snaking down his unbuttoned collar, the wind crawling through his hair. 

The dark ground reaching up to him, swallowing the light.

In time, it passed: the burning in his lungs and throat, the metallic taste, the incessant watering of his mouth. The cold chased it all away, and Eli was left with an uncomfortable weight in his stomach — he imagined it to be the carrots and potatoes, still undigested, half-rotten, now waiting to crawl back out. 

With slow, clumsy fingers, Eli closed the window once again and impulsively pulled his sleeve down over his hand to wipe the remnants of frost away. Outside, the fields looked silver beneath the moon, each brown fern and dying wildflower crusted over with ice; he was mesmerized briefly, eyes unfocused but fixed, until he saw the grass moving and realized it was not the wind, but rather some mid-sized animal making its way from the woods to the stable, where Helminth’s body waited to be consumed.

Eli turned away, throat clogged again. Would he bury the body tomorrow when the delivery boy came? Would he ask the boy to help, or would he force him, or would he leave the matter until his return the following day?

He told himself he would not leave the body there for Thrawn and Pellaeon to deal with. Though the death was hardly Eli’s fault, Helminth was his responsibility, and it would be unforgivably uncouth to leave the corpse rotting on the stable floor. Still, the thought of leaving her there — of abandoning the corpse and never returning to bury it, of leaving Thrawn to bury him (to bury _ her, _to bury Helminth, not Pellaeon; a slip, that’s all it was, a mental slip) — stuck in Eli’s chest like a ball of ice, slowly melting and spreading throughout his bloodstream, leaving his limbs cool and relaxed.

He would _ not _ leave her there, he told himself. He was better than that. There was a small but elegant washroom adjacent to his bedroom and he stepped inside, forcing himself to think only of the warm water he might be able to coax from the pipes, to leave the muddy, writhing mess of problems in his head behind.

The copper bathtub was encased in wood and raised on a marble slab opposite a stained-glass window which Eli could only assume looked down on the same dead forest as his bedroom did. Fine white tile lined the floors and walls, lending a sterile, sanitary air to the room that was sorely lacking in Eli’s own washroom (which was, in point of fact, a primitive privy hidden in the trees behind his practice). The nickel plumbing was exposed, with fixtures running out of the floor to hang over the side of the tub, and when Eli turned the faucet, he laid a hand on one of those pipes and was comforted to feel it quickly turn warm. 

He was less comforted by the quality of the water which gushed from the faucet into the cool copper of the tub. It was murky and dark, with a scummy stench that brought to mind yellow algae, a rotting skin on the surface of a lake. Hastily, Eli fished the plug out from the bottom of the tub, recoiling when the tips of his fingers dipped into that foul water. He perched on the edge and watched the old, dirty water circle the drain until finally it ran clean. 

He undressed carefully, leaving his thrice-worn clothes to hang on the marble sink, where at least they wouldn’t accrue too many wrinkles. The cold touched him again as he stood there, wracking his limbs with gooseflesh and severe shivers until finally he couldn’t bear to wait until the tub was full; instead, he lowered himself into the water when there was still less than an inch of it swirling around the bottom of the tub, the heat searing his legs even as his back felt like it was frozen to the still-cold copper behind him. 

Sighing, Eli shifted his weight continuously until the heat no longer seemed so offensive against his skin and he could finally relax into the water. Here, it was easy to forget the dark halls of Lycia House — the terrible paintings and gruesome illustrations on the walls — the pulsing root cellar, the stench of death inside the stables, the red eyes in Pellaeon’s sick-room, the dead blue skin pressed close to waxy white.

The delivery boy would come tomorrow, Eli told himself. His throat was tight, his eyes burning. He looked down at himself, naked and shivering despite the heat burning his legs and the steam swirling around him. He saw dark droplets in the water — expanding, turning into thin pink coils — and turned the faucet off reflexively, before he realized this wasn’t the murky black corruption he’d seen earlier.

He could hear himself breathing — too quick, too shallow, too hoarse. He swiped at his nose and stared at the blood on his fingers. 

_ You spoke to me directly, _ said a voice in his head, and Eli flinched, slamming his hand into the hot water. Blood rose from his submerged fingers to swirl in the tub. He raised his other hand, the dry one, to his nose and tilted his head back to stem the bleeding. 

It was no use. His heart was pounding; the blood flowed faster than before, most of it trickling down his throat, coating his tongue in copper.

_ That’s why I chose you, _said the voice. It had an echo to it again, Eli noticed; a second, deeper level to the voice he’d first heard over a month ago. The same accent, the same inflections, but just half a second behind.

_ You bypassed the proxy, _said the voice. It sounded weary — as exhausted as Eli was. The second layer took over, its deeper timbre drowning out the tones that Eli heard in his dreams. 

_ Take care of him, _ it said, and this time there was no echo.

_ Take care of who? _ asked Eli, his heart beating so wildly now that it was pounding in his ear drums, forcing blood out of his nostrils, over his fingers, over his chin. He gave up trying to swallow the blood and tilted his head down once more, watching a veritable stream of red enter the water. He cursed under his breath and turned the faucet back on, his blood-stained fingers slipping over the nickel pipes.

Fresh water gushed into the bathtub, uncomfortably cold, coming out dark and rank again. Eli watched it cover his legs, eating up the pale pink streams of blood until they were entirely invisible. Slowly, the water turned clear again; slowly, it warmed up.

_ I’m fading fast, _ said the voice. 

Eli washed his hands in the dark water, splashed a handful of it over his face. His nostrils felt raw and swollen, but they were no longer bleeding.

When the voice spoke again, it was so quiet Eli could scarcely hear it, but still he knew that he was no longer talking to Thrawn. 

_ By morning I’ll be gone, _ it said, _ and you must keep him fed. _


	4. Chapter 4

He thought at first that the flakes were ash, that someone was burning wood or fallen leaves or brush in the trees. But of course, it was only snow. He gripped the wooden handle of the shovel and watched fat white clumps of snow land on the sleeve of the thick work shirt he’d borrowed from Pellaeon’s closet, where it had been hidden behind rows of fine suits and tailored silk shirts. The flakes turned transparent, losing shape as they melted and left small damp spots on the material to show where they’d been.

It was strange, Eli thought, that for the first time since arriving at Lycia House, he wasn’t cold. The shirt he’d borrowed was lined with what remained of an ancestral quilt  — faded, but still warm  — more than adequate insulation against the intense December chill. The wind buffeting at his ears was blocked entirely by a scratchy wool cap he’d found in one of the travel chests when he’d cleared out Pellaeon’s room.

It was sterile there now. He’d erased every trace of death immediately after removing the body; it had been a compulsion, unstoppable, and at the time it had seemed harmless to concentrate his energy on the simple things: warm water, soap, disinfectant, open windows, soaking rags. He’d had no way of knowing that it would snow before he could get Pellaeon’s body in the ground.

He’d had no way of knowing that the ground would be so damned hard already, either. He clenched his fingers around the shovel handle, splinters digging into his ungloved palms. Behind him, silent and evidently unperturbed, Thrawn sat on the ground wearing Pellaeon’s winter coat, unbuttoned, his head resting listlessly against a crooked tombstone. He had not glanced at Eli once since they made their way to the family plot.

The body was next to him, wrapped loosely, not in the sick-room sheets as Eli had suggested but in a fine silk blanket of foreign manufacture. Pellaeon’s dark hair was just barely visible beneath the folds, each strand dotted with silver snowflakes. His hand had come free from the makeshift shroud and lay outstretched, palm up, his fingers just barely touching Thrawn’s. 

Their skin was nearly the same color now.

Again, Eli stabbed the tip of the shovel into the hard-packed earth. Again, he failed to break ground. He cursed, grasping the handle with blistered hands, shaking it frenetically in a moment of quiet rage, with his shoe holding the tip against the ground. The steel head wobbled where it connected to the wood, threatening to break off, and Eli stopped. He was warm beneath the work-shirt, his cheeks flushed, his breath coming hard.

He glanced over his shoulder at Thrawn and caught him holding Pellaeon’s stiff hand, caught him staring, eyes half-closed, at what could be seen of the dead man’s hair. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask for help  — rather, to demand it, to jerk the shovel out of the ground and toss it Thrawn’s way, to stomp over to Pellaeon’s body and stand there, resting, while someone else finished the job. But the last few days had changed Thrawn drastically, eating away at his grace and quickness, eroding the musculature Eli had admired on his first visit.

Sometimes he suspected it was melancholia; then he caught a glimpse of the hard-edged clarity in Thrawn’s eyes as he stared at Pellaeon’s body and suspected it was something else. 

He kicked at the brittle, frost-covered grass, grinding it down into the earth as though that might soften it up. There was a soft noise from behind him and he glanced over his shoulder again, but it was only Thrawn moving closer to Pellaeon, getting a firmer grasp on that blue-tinged hand.

Eli lifted the shovel and slammed it into the ground again. The blade sunk half-an-inch into the earth before it stopped. He leaned on it, pushing down with all his weight, straining until his arms began to shake, but it did not nudge.

“Thrawn,” he said finally. His voice was hoarse; his tongue was heavy. “It’s not going to work.”

He received no response. Thrawn had pulled the body closer to him, adjusting it so that Pellaeon’s head rested in his lap. His fingers threaded through Pellaeon’s hair, brushing out the snowflakes. Eli was glad he could not see Pellaeon’s face; he didn’t want to see the open, staring eyes, the thick film which covered them, the broken blood vessels which had turned Pellaeon’s gaze ugly and red.

Wearily, Eli pulled the shovel out of the ground and pushed it away from him, letting it fall. The handle knocked against an old grave, making a hollow noise which seemed muted by the snow. 

“I’m going inside,” said Eli, but he didn’t move. His eyes caught on Thrawn’s cheeks, bruised purple by the wind and cold. It took everything in him to take the three quick steps to Thrawn’s side; he was hyper-aware of Pellaeon’s exposed head, unable to forget that each step bought him a better view of the face he didn’t want to see.

His knees protested when he finally bent them after what seemed like hours fighting the frozen ground. He crouched as close to Thrawn as he could get with Pellaeon’s body in the way.

Thrawn’s eyes slid closed, the red glow disappearing. He bowed his head, leaving Eli to stare at the snowflakes in his blue-black hair. Unlike the thick white clumps which fell on Eli’s sleeves, these flakes seemed unwilling to melt. They stood out starkly against Thrawn’s hair, each of them a perfect, sharp, unique shape.

Gently, Eli laid his palm against Thrawn’s wind-bitten cheek. Thrawn’s skin was as smooth and cool as marble; Eli’s was warm and calloused from the failed burial, from his fight with the shovel and the frozen ground. 

_ Bring him back to the sick-room,  _ Eli said. Thrawn’s eyes were closed so lightly he could have been asleep, but the muscles in his throat tightened, and Eli knew he’d heard him. He dug through the layer of frustration inside him, searching for the feelings of concern and protectiveness beneath the surface, and focused on projecting those to Thrawn the same way he projected his thoughts.

He couldn’t be sure it worked. This time, there was no facial tic to give it away. Eli stayed there, as frozen as the ground, with his hand against Thrawn’s cheek. He liked to imagine some of his warmth was leeching into Thrawn’s skin, but in reality, Eli’s fingers were only turning cold.

_ Go inside,  _ Eli urged, and finally, Thrawn’s eyes slid open again, flickering up to meet Eli’s gaze. He shifted, his hands slipping underneath Pellaeon’s head to cradle him closer, and Eli rocked back on his heels, giving Thrawn space to stand. Slowly, silently, Thrawn lifted Pellaeon’s body off the ground, wrapping the shroud around his exposed face with one hand.

He walked back to Lycia House without a word. Left behind in the little graveyard, Eli felt suddenly stiff and cold; his frustration was gone; the warmth built up from long, hard work had dissipated. So, too, had his motivation. It no longer seemed imperative that he return to the house. He stared at the faded headstone against which Thrawn had leaned for support, his eyes unfocused, refusing to make sense of the letters. 

His legs trembled, muscles protesting, and Eli slowly lowered himself out of the crouch, onto his knees. His fingers brushed the cold stone. Time had eroded the letters engraved on it, lichen eating away the dates and most of the given name. All that was left was the family name: Car’das.

That wasn’t exactly what Eli had expected to see in the Pellaeon family plot. He traced the letters, relishing the sharp ache of the stone against his blisters when his fingers curved around the ridge of the C. It was an ancient stone; perhaps it belonged to someone who’d married into the family long ago, or to a distant cousin or family friend who happened to die on the grounds. 

He glanced at the other headstones, too far away and too faded to read, and exhaustion settled over him like a heavy blanket. He stretched out to reach the shovel without standing, used it to prop himself up. He didn’t want to lean on the headstone as he stood, like Thrawn had. He hadn’t blinked when Thrawn had done it, had not registered the disrespect or over-familiarity inherent to such a gesture  — but to use the stone like that himself felt somehow wrong.

By the time he dragged himself back to Lycia House, the cold had claimed his bones once more and his nose was running. He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, stared at the blood smeared on his skin without surprise. This time, at least, the nosebleed was nothing more than a trickle; it had dried up, or perhaps frozen, before he reached the front door. 

He left the shovel in the dead grass there, exposed to the elements and went inside. Over the past few days, he’d taken it upon himself to locate Pellaeon’s stock of candles and distribute them evenly throughout the house, with matchbooks beside them for easy access. There had been several oil lamps waiting to be used in an empty room, and Eli had placed one in his own bedroom and one in the sick-room beside Pellaeon’s bed. 

Now, he didn’t know where he could put it. If this were any other house, he would take it to the kitchen so he could see as he cooked. But this was Lycia House, and the larder was empty, and the delivery boy had never come. It seemed increasingly likely to Eli that there had never been a delivery boy in the first place. 

In death, Pellaeon had the look of a starved man, wasted away over a period of several years by consumption. He weighed only ninety pounds; certainly he had not lost all that weight in the past few days. The larder must have been empty for a long, long time.

He tried not to think about Thrawn, who had been here since the blizzard last year, who had only lost weight and muscle definition when Pellaeon slipped into a coma. When the thought would not go away, Eli whispered to it that he must have been foraging in the woods. Surely there had been something worth finding there. Something to grow, something to hunt.

It was better to think this than to dwell on the alternatives. 

* * *

He entered the kitchen and stopped still in the doorway, staring at the open cellar door. The square-shaped hole in the floor looked like an unnatural shadow stretching out to him, trying to pull him down. Eli could hear faint sounds from below the floorboards: footsteps on the old wooden ladder, the scraping of a barrel against the dirt floor, the heavy sound of a cloth-shrouded burden being set down.

Deliberately, he turned away. One thing he had  _ not _ heard was the striking of a match, which was enough evidence to satisfy him that the man in the root cellar was Thrawn. This was all he needed to know and all he wanted to learn. He would enter the root cellar only when he became too famished to stay away.

Instead, Eli made his way up the stairs to the second floor. He hesitated on the top step, caressing the banister where he’d rested his forehead days before. Then, he’d been wearied and fatigued, his clothes stale, his stomach begging for more food and simultaneously rejecting what he’d given it. Then, he’d been certain rescue was imminent, that a delivery boy would arrive with groceries within the week, driving a horse and cart perfectly capable of taking Eli back to civilization.

Now, he wasn’t so sure. 

He turned left at the top of the stairs, angling himself away from the small bedroom he’d claimed for his own. He’d explored precious little of Lycia House in his time here, going only where his presence was absolutely necessary: the sick-room to care for Pellaeon; the root cellar and kitchen to search for food; the guest room where he’d been lucky enough to find spare candles; the family plot. 

Until today, he’d wandered this hall with his eyes on his feet, ignoring the ghoulish oil paintings at his sides, pretending not to see the preserved cicadas in their frame, the textbook illustrations of disease. He’d refused to even consider the closed doors which led to rooms he’d never seen. For him, the house consisted only of his bedroom, the sick-room, and the small room where he’d first met Thrawn.

Things were different now. Without stopping to examine his motivations or check his impulses, Eli turned to a door on his left and twisted the brass knob. 

It opened.

* * *

Thus began what would become a near-obsessive exploration of Lycia House and its connected grounds. There were many rooms Eli had never seen before, each of them full of evidence of the people who had come before Gilad Pellaeon. There were dusty bedrooms which must have once housed children, and a nursery down the hall from Eli’s room filled with archaic wooden toys, each of them rough and splintered, carved by an inadequately talented hand. 

By the time he poked his head into the third room, he’d forgotten all about Pellaeon’s death, about the failed burial, about Thrawn’s worsening condition — about the threads of nausea and feverish cold which whispered along the edges of Eli’s brain like an echo of someone else’s thoughts. His fingers itched for a pen and paper; he longed to make a complete inventory of everything he found.

Wardrobes full of moth-eaten clothes tailored for men and women of slight build; rotten leather shoes made for narrow feet; trunks of ancient quilts stitched together by young women in anticipation of their wedding day, all of them now dead. 

There were portraits in some of the rooms — some hanging on the walls, others covered in burlap tarps on the ground. The men in these portraits were fair-haired and, from what Eli could tell, rather short. The women were slender and pale. Here and there he could spot a shared nose (upturned, but not piggish), an identical pair of almond-shaped eyes, the same oval face shape staring out at him from one painting to the next.

Taken together, the portraits seemed almost like a family tree, one made up exclusively of people who were small and slim, of men who tended toward stockiness in the middle age, of light hair and green eyes. 

People entirely dissimilar to Pellaeon, Eli noted. He could find Pellaeon’s heavy brows and ruddy complexion nowhere in the portraits. No ancestor seemed to share his height, his widow’s peak, his coal-black hair or aristocratic nose. There were clothes in a well-kept room on the second floor which seemed to fit someone of Pellaeon’s height — they were out of fashion by several decades, but well-maintained, and their age indicated whoever owned them had been in the house around the same time the newest portraits had been painted. Yet there was no one of that height and build to be seen. 

_ And Pellaeon was thin, _ whispered some part of Eli he refused to acknowledge as he ran his fingers over the clothes.  _ Too thin for these. _

He pulled a sweater from the wardrobe and held it to his nose, inhaling the crisp scent of soap and evergreen needles. It had been cleaned and air-dried recently, he suspected. There were no holes chewed in the material by moths; an unraveled section near the cuff had recently been mended.

The sweater had been knitted for someone tall with a fine musculature on a slender frame. The rest of the clothes in the old wardrobe seemed to fit this same description; there was an old-fashioned coat, the tails and lapels of which had not been cut separately as all coats had been made during Eli’s lifetime. It lent the article a strange, crude air which reminded Eli of his grandfather.

There were full-length, light-colored trousers, recently pressed, with stirrups at the foot in a fashion Eli had rarely seen. They were cut full through the hips and thighs, tapering at the ankles; behind them hung an evening cape complete with a fur collar. Eli touched it and found it as soft and luxurious as ermine, though the color was chestnut rather than white. 

He drew away from the wardrobe, mind churning, and turned his eyes to the rest of the room — to things he had spotted but ignored upon his first entrance. It was the room where he’d first met Thrawn, though he’d never seen it in daylight before. The bed was made up so pristinely that Eli doubted it had been slept in this week; the furniture had all been dusted, the floor swept.

There was a wooden frame leaning against the wall, covered by a long piece of burlap. Eli slid the cloth off carefully to examine the painting underneath: a half-finished portrait of an old man, his skin as thin as paper, his hair thoroughly white. Parts of the canvas were covered in nothing more than faint graphite sketches; others had been filled in with oil paints in the same style as the newer portraits Eli had seen in his exploration of Lycia House.

Carefully, he pressed his thumbnail into the old man’s fair skin. The paint was dry. 

Eli leaned back, still holding the burlap cloth, and considered the painting for a moment. In time, he swiveled around the room, searching for any sign of paintbrushes and pigment — a traveling chest like the ones in Pellaeon’s sick-room — and found nothing, not even a palette. Finally, folding the burlap over his arm, he returned to the portrait and examined it closer.

There was a signature, barely legible, in the right-hand corner of the canvas. It had been signed in graphite with an unsteady hand and was almost completely rubbed away by time. Eli could only tentatively make out the first name: Jorj. 

He stood slowly, draping the burlap over the painting. He rested his hand on the wooden frame as he mulled it over; eventually, still deep in thought, he moved to the small oak desk in the corner, from which Pellaeon had procured a sheet of paper during his first meeting with Thrawn. The desk was bare, appearing almost unused. There were no ink stains on the surface, no dots of wax dried into the wood.

Eli opened the drawers and rifled through them without the slightest prick of conscience. When he discovered a sheaf of letters he stopped, retreating to the bed, where he sat on the fine red quilt with the letters in his hand. They were written in the same strange, unfamiliar language which Eli had seen once before, when he asked Thrawn to describe his symptoms.

And they were not written by Thrawn, either. The handwriting was cramped and boxy, the ink smeared by someone clumsily using his left hand to compose. It was entirely unlike the elegant, expert penmanship Eli had seen from Thrawn. And of course, there was one more clue, so obvious it rendered any analysis Eli could make of the handwriting utterly superfluous.

The letters were addressed to Mitth’raw’nuruodo. 

They were signed, simply: Jorj.

* * *

Since Pellaeon’s attempted funeral, Lycia House had seemed both cold and empty to Eli; he felt at times that he was the only living creature left in those dark halls. Though he knew Pellaeon’s body had come to rest in the root cellar, he had not seen Thrawn once — not in the sick-room, not in his bedroom, not in the halls. 

He knew where Thrawn was, of course.

He desperately wished he didn’t. The knowledge came to him whether he invited it or not, particularly when he could find nothing with which to busy himself, his hands, his mind. When his pen hesitated over the inventory, that was when he felt it: the cold seeping into his muscles and then into his bones; the ache of his ribs, the unnatural emptiness of his stomach; the darkness encroaching on his vision, threatening to render him blind. 

These sensations were not his own. They threatened to drown him nonetheless. 

Reluctantly, he made his way down the corridors of Lycia House, opening the doors of each and every room along the way. As he suspected, they were empty. He circled down the stairs with a lump in his throat and approached the kitchen; each step felt heavier than the last, as though his feet were being gradually encased in lead.

Inside the kitchen, the trapdoor to the root cellar was still open. It had not closed once, to Eli’s knowledge, since Pellaeon’s failed burial. He hesitated near the opening; he could see nothing beyond the first rung of the wooden ladder.

“Thrawn?” he called. “If you would be so kind as to leave the root cellar, sir …”

There was no response, and Eli felt the cold tugging on his bones more persistently than before. The lump in his throat grew larger, threatening to strangle him. He attempted to speak again, and nothing came out.

He cleared his throat. He tried again.

“Thrawn—” he said. His voice was weak; it cracked and disappeared before he’d even finished that singular word. The cold and dark combined in a threat to consume him and he fought them back; in a panic, he fought back everything foreign in his mind entirely, pushing all of it away. He felt fingers being plucked away from his thoughts, retreating from his brain, from places he hadn’t even noticed they’d invaded.

Mentally, he shut a heavy door. He locked and barricaded it.

And suddenly, the strange sensation of cold and spreading darkness disappeared. The lump in his throat dissolved, leaving in its wake nothing but a sharp, thin ache.

“Come into the light, sir,” Eli said, and he was pleased to hear the strength in his voice again. For a moment, he believed there would still be no response — but a second later he caught the faint red glow of Thrawn’s eyes from deep in the cellar, and a second after that he swung his feet off the top rung of the latter and moved back to allow Thrawn to climb up. 

The eyes which met his were steady and unblinking; Thrawn’s facial expression was frozen into a look of polite curiosity which gave nothing away. His clothes, on the other hand, were now ill-fitting and covered in dirt from the root cellar. He rose to his feet, staring down at Eli, and it was possible that Eli imagined the line of fatigue in Thrawn’s shoulders, the bruises ringing his eyes. 

He felt a touch of pressure against his mind. He brushed it away and watched Thrawn’s eye twitch in response.

“You’re in dire need of a bath,” said Eli with a lightness he did not feel. He wrapped his fingers around Thrawn’s upper arm, ostensibly brushing away the dirt which had accumulated there — in reality, he was searching for any hint of warmth, and he found nothing. “Have you been down there since the funeral?” he asked as he stepped away.

Thrawn watched him silently as Eli bent and clutched the brass ring of the trapdoor. With his other hand, he grabbed the wooden edge of the door and eased it down, slipping his fingers out from under it just before it closed. With the entrance to the root cellar closed off, he could almost pretend this was his own kitchen — safe and warm and comfortable. 

Thrawn, on the other hand, seemed suddenly drained of color and stamina both. He leaned against the kitchen table heavily, all signs of rigid composure fleeing him, leaving his posture slumped and causing his formerly-tailored clothes to hang away from him worse than before.

There was no other recourse than for Eli to guide Thrawn up the stairs. He led him to his own bedroom, to the armchair in the corner, where Thrawn waited as docile and exhausted as a lamb before slaughter while Eli retreated to a room down the hall where he’d discovered warm, comfortable clothes which must have belonged to Pellaeon. They were in a condition of moderate disrepair — unworn, it seemed, for several years — but they were soft, and they would do. 

Back in the bedroom, he found Thrawn sitting with his elbows on his knees, his face hidden in his hands. At a glance, Eli could not tell if he was sleeping or falling apart. He touched the other man’s shoulder — gently, cautiously, his touch as light as the brush of a bird’s wing — and Thrawn looked up again, eyes dry but hooded. Silently, he took Eli’s hand in his own and laid it against his cheek the same way Eli had done in Pellaeon’s family plot.

“You can sleep later,” said Eli, not unkindly. He barely heard the words which battered at his mind, forceful and quick —  _ Let me in. _ He was already moving on. “First, I think it’s advisable you bathe, sir, or at least change into fresh clothes. It will do your mind some good.”

Blankly, Thrawn stared at the proffered sweater in Eli’s hand. He made no move to take it. When he met Eli’s eyes, it was with a questioning slant to his eyebrows; other than that small quirk, Eli could not read his face.

_ I won’t take much, _ Thrawn said, and his voice was so reassuring, so confident, so trustworthy that Eli almost believed him. He moved his hand back to Thrawn’s shoulder, his thumb stroking a small tear in the fabric there, and shook his head. 

“You’ll take a bath,” he said, using his very best bedside manner — authoritative and firm, but gentle. “And then you’ll change. And then, if you still desire so, you may return to your vigil in the root cellar.”

He watched Thrawn’s eyes close, his lashes stark against blue skin. He eased the barricade a little and felt a horrible mixture of nausea and hunger and weariness closing in; he slammed the barricade back down. A moment later, Thrawn sagged against him, half-conscious — and a moment after that, he righted himself, posture as erect as ever, eyes hard. 

He walked to the washroom unaided; sitting in his bedroom alone, Eli could hear the pipes rattling as water filled them, could see steam leaking through the bottom of the door. 

He folded the clothes he’d fetched for Thrawn and left them piled on the bed in plain sight. Eli had found various rooms in Lycia House which came equipped with dressing rooms adjacent to the washroom; his was not so well-equipped, and so he exited the bedroom entirely to give Thrawn privacy when he emerged.

He spent a long hour alone on the cold grounds, the collar of his coat pulled high against his neck to bar the wind. The only tolerable place he could find was toward the back of the house, where he could see neither the stables nor the family plot. Before him lay a stretch of frosted meadow and bare trees. 

Next year, he hoped, winter wouldn’t come so fast. He imagined Lycia House must be beautiful in spring — the marshes green and full of life, the woods teeming with wildflowers. It was a difficult thing to picture when the grounds were grey and cold, but Eli could see it nonetheless.

He returned to his room and found it quite as he left it, with one notable exception: the clothes he’d left behind were discarded in the corner of the room, looking very much like Thrawn had undone Eli’s careless folding job, inspected the clothes, and re-folded them just to lay them on the floor; where they’d been resting on the bed, Thrawn now lay asleep, wrapped in the topmost blanket so that Eli could see nothing but the top of his head.

Standing in the doorway, unsure what to think, Eli let the barricade between them ease up again. He felt nothing but warmth and the sweetness of oblivion clawing at the corners of his mind.

* * *

He found the jar of leeches quite by accident. It was not unearthed during his daytime searches of Lycia House’s various empty rooms; instead, Eli discovered it at night, after he’d laid aside his growing inventory and washed his ink-stained hands with dark water from the nickel pipes. 

He was tired, but not tired enough to sleep. His eyes burned with a fatigued sort of energy; his muscles felt strained and furious. It was evident to him that if he tried to lie in bed and close his eyes, he would stay awake for hours, sweating beneath the blankets, tossing and turning incessantly. So instead, he grabbed his coat and slung it over his shoulders, venturing down the stairs and back outside.

His intention, initially, was only to rescue the shovel from where he’d abandoned it near the front step. He would return it to its home in the garden shed adjacent to the stable — but halfway to the stable he remembered Helminth’s body and found himself turning away, his feet pushing through a fresh layer of snow and leading him through the dark grounds back to Pellaeon’s family plot.

Along the way, straining to see with the moon obscured by fog, Eli tried to rationalize what he was doing. He told himself he was only going to collect enough snow to fill the icebox, so he could fill it up with potatoes and carrots and salt herring and thus avoid further trips to the root cellar. Then he remembered that he had no bucket to fill, no way to carry the snow back to the house, and this excuse died.

He told himself he was bringing the shovel with him to test the ground. If it had softened at all, perhaps he could bury Pellaeon come morning. But this was ridiculous — it had snowed, softly or swiftly, all day, and the ground was harder than ever. He carried the shovel only because he had not thought to put it down.

He reached the crumbled stone wall which lined the graveyard and came to a halt.

What, then, was he doing here? His hands were frozen ‘round the handle of the shovel. His feet felt like blocks of ice inside his flimsy shoes. His trouser legs were wet with snow, clinging to his skin.

He should have gone back inside, he knew it. But instead he found himself stepping over the small stone wall, walking numbly to the gravestone against which Thrawn had leaned when they tried to bury Pellaeon earlier that day. He fell to his knees, tossing the shovel behind him into the snow, his fingers finding the eroded name in the dark and tracing the letters once more.

_ Car’das. _ That much was clear. But what came before it? He dug his hands into the rough-cut lines, allowed the unhewn edge of stone to press against his blisters once again. Was there a J in the first name, or was he only imagining it? It was a short name; of this he was certain. Though he couldn’t make out the letters, he could state with confidence that there were only four or five of them. 

He shuffled to the other graves nearby. There were many of them — generations of dead family members crowded together in one tiny plot. He scrabbled over the stones with senseless hands, feeling for the names he couldn’t see. 

This one read  _ Car’das. _

He moved to another grave and traced the name:  _ Car’das. _

His eyes adjusted, turning the shadows in the family plot from blocks of implacable darkness to nothing more than a slight fog. All around him, underneath the lichen, he could make out the same name:  _ Car’das, Car’das, Car’das _ — and not one Pellaeon anywhere in sight. 

Slowly, trembling from the cold, Eli pushed himself to his feet. He turned in a slow circle, feeling clumsy and sluggish. His eyes roved from one gravestone to the next until he felt dizzy and had to stop.

His search for the shovel was brief and perfunctory; it had already been covered by snow, and Eli’s ungloved hands had turned bright red, singing with pain. He made his way back to the stone wall, feet dragging; on his way out, he stumbled over what he thought to be a fallen block and fell to one knee, his hands slamming down into the snow. 

He turned to look over his shoulder at the stone wall, twisting at the waist, wiping his hands on his coat and making them smart even worse than before. He could just make out the object he’d tripped over, and it certainly wasn’t a stone: it was a large jar, the glass nearly opaque with frost. 

Against his best judgment, Eli pulled his sleeve over his right hand and wiped the frost away. Inside, to his astonishment, the dirty water had not yet frozen. The leeches floated inside, limp and unmoving, appearing almost deflated.

They had to be dead, Eli told himself. Perhaps that was why Thrawn had left them here, next to the graves. He’d stopped feeding them — or he’d neglected to clean their water — or he’d simply left them somewhere a smidge too cold, and now they were dead, and all Eli had to do was stand up and turn his back on them and leave them there. He could forget about them entirely; they were out of the house, out of his life. Dead.

He tapped the glass. The leeches did not move. Carefully, with both hands covered by his sleeves, Eli held the lid in place and rocked the jar, testing to see if it was frozen to the ground. It moved easily, unfettered by ice. Inside, the water level swayed and dipped from side to side, moving the leeches with it.

If asked later, Eli would say he never came to a conscious decision to take the leeches inside. He moved by instinct alone — without thinking, he hauled the jar off the ground and cradled it to his chest with both hands, making his way across the snowy lawn back to Lycia House. 

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom in silence, grateful for the lack of candlelight which obscured the paintings and illustrations and cicada collections leering at him from the walls. Each step seemed heavy and slow; in his arms, the frost rimmed ‘round the glass of the jar heated and turned to water, some of it soaking into his chest, some of it running down and dripping on the floor. 

He walked down the dark, abandoned hall, teeth grit, shivering more intensely now that he was inside. He could see a candle burning in his room before he got there; when he kicked the door closed behind him, he saw that the blankets were mussed where someone had sat on the edge. 

He placed the jar of leeches on his desk and stared at them, floating still and shriveled in the water. He tapped the glass again.

One of them twitched.

Eli did not smile, but he nodded to himself, grimly satisfied. As he grabbed his washbasin and headed into the washroom, where the pipes would dispense water as foul and murky as what waited in the jar, he thought,  _ Here they’ll be warm enough to live.  _

He’d only need to figure out what to feed them.

* * *

His lancets were missing.

He noticed during his now-traditional examination of his saddle bag. Since Helminth’s death, Eli had emptied his saddle bag five times, spilling the contents onto his bedspread for a ritual inspection and re-organization. Each time, he consulted a list he’d made of the complete contents and checked them off before replacing them, every vial to its slot, every instrument in its place.

He did this when he was anxious — when he was tired — when he was full of energy and didn’t know what else to do. He did this when he couldn’t summon the bravery and concentration needed for a full exploration of Lycia House to continue his inventory.

Today, the lancets were missing. 

It wasn’t important, he told himself. He could foresee no situation here at Lycia House which would require the lancets — certainly not for bloodletting, which was their intended purpose. He eyed the jar of leeches on his desk, placed away from the window; the five which had survived their night in the snow were docile and small. They would hibernate throughout the winter; it was possible Eli would never need to feed them, and even if he did, he would never resort to pricking his finger and feeding them his blood.

Still, it rankled him to find the lancets missing. He combed through the contents of his saddle bag once more, removing every item he’d stowed away and spreading them out on his bed. When he wasn’t in his room, his saddle bag lay unguarded and in plain sight on the overstuffed armchair in the corner; Thrawn, who had stayed silent and out of sight since the day before, could have slipped in and stolen the lancets at any time when Eli was inventorying the house. 

But why take them? Simply because he coveted them? But if so, why take the extraordinarily plain thumb lancets and leave behind the exquisite tortoiseshell case? 

Surely he did not  _ need _ them, Eli told himself. He thought of the leeches lying dormant in their jar; he thought of how Thrawn had lifted one of them with the forceps and placed it on Pellaeon’s neck.

With a shudder, he scooped up the various vials and instruments on the bed and tossed them back into his saddle bag without any of his characteristic care or orderliness. He performed another requisite search of the rooms on the second floor, poking his head into each of them to confirm Thrawn was not there. His search of the room at the end of the hall, and of Pellaeon’s former sick-room, was more thorough: he patted down the pristinely-made beds, search the desk drawers, looked in the travel chests and the unfinished portrait of an elderly man.

He wasn’t shocked to discover no hint of the thumb lancets.

His next stop, after retrieving the unused oil lamp from the sick-room, was the kitchen. The trapdoor leading to the root cellar was open once again, the cellar itself waiting to swallow Eli whole. There was a book of matches waiting on the table where he’d left them days previous, and he stalled momentarily, taking his time to select a match, to strike it against the table and bring the flame to the oil-wet wick. 

He hesitated at the top of the ladder, the oil lamp dangling from one hand, his palms suddenly clammy with sweat. He wiped them on his trousers and stepped onto the first rung cautiously.

He did not announce his presence. When he touched ground on the hard-packed dirt floor of the cellar, he was suddenly caught between two lights: the white flare of the oil lamp and the dim red glow of Thrawn’s eyes.

Thrawn sat, as Eli had expected him to be, at the very end of the root cellar, half-hidden by the barrels he’d moved out from the wall the day Pellaeon died. At first, Eli could see only Thrawn — his back to the wall, his eyes cast downward, his hand covering his lips. 

As he grew nearer, of course, he saw other things: Pellaeon’s body, as cold and white as it had been days before, showing no signs of decay. The makeshift shroud, still wrapped around him almost as though it were protecting him from the cold. The thumb lancets in their tortoiseshell case, lying open on the ground.

“Thrawn?” said Eli, stopping just on the other side of the barrels. From here, he could smell the earthy scent of unwashed potatoes and carrots waiting to be eaten; if he stepped further, he knew a much less pleasant smell would greet him and he had no desire to expose himself to it before it was necessary.

He could see the wound on Pellaeon’s neck. It had not been there before. Small though it was, it still stood out in the light from Eli’s lamp — bloodless and white and gaping. He knew immediately what had caused it.

If he stared too long, the image before him blended with the memory of Helminth’s squirming black mouth. He wrenched his eyes away; he was suddenly, painfully aware of how tightly his jaw was clenched. When had he first started to grind his teeth together? When he crawled backward down the ladder with the lamp in his hand? When he saw Thrawn sitting vigil next to Pellaeon’s body? Or when he first discovered the lancets missing from his saddle bag?

With difficulty, he turned his gaze to Thrawn, to the peculiar angle of his fingers — outstretched and bent away from his face — to the bend of his palm, curved ‘round his lips. Eli approached Thrawn with a numbness that forbade all sensible thought; he knelt before the other man, their eyes catching.

_ Let me see, _ he said, and when he took Thrawn’s wrist and pulled the hand away from his mouth, Thrawn did not resist. 

There was an open cut on Thrawn’s palm, a small and almost innocent wound, of the same type and cleanliness of the one on Pellaeon’s neck. The lancet had sliced Thrawn’s skin neatly, separating the top half of his palm from the bottom with a welling line of red.

When Eli’s gaze flickered upward, he saw a drop of blood on Thrawn’s lips. Thrawn’s eyes were on him, intensely red, burning into Eli with an expectation Eli could not quite define. 

He thought of the frozen ground of the family plot and how it refused to yield to him. He thought of the eroded, lichen-covered letters on the gravestones, whispering all the wrong names to Eli in the middle of the night.

He thought of the jar of leeches on his desk upstairs.

He raised Thrawn’s palm to his lips and licked the blood away.

_ Here,  _ he said.  _ Let me. _


	5. Chapter 5

The nosebleeds grew worse with every passing day. 

Perhaps that was unsurprising; the amount of stress Eli was forced to cope with had only increased as the food supply dwindled, and it was certainly dwindling fast. The barrels in the root cellar had never been full to begin with, and now they were dangerously close to empty (and too near to Pellaeon’s body for frequent perusal in any case).

Eli noticed, of course, that there was never any food missing for which he could not personally account. If he removed a salt herring from the cellar, then there would be only one less salt herring in the barrel the following day. No one else was harvesting food from that dank pit.

And it did not escape his notice, either, that Thrawn had desisted in his rapid wasting and started to gain muscle instead, despite his apparent attempt at continued hunger strikes following Pellaeon’s demise. As his own energy disappeared, Eli could not bring himself to ponder on the other man’s quick recovery. He had only sufficient stores to muddle through his own problems.

The nosebleeds, chiefly. 

_ This, _ said Eli as he abandoned the travel chest he’d been examining and held a stained kerchief to his nose, _ is the third one today. _

He could sense Thrawn’s mind at the border of his own — it was a comfortable presence just cold and distant enough to separate itself from Eli’s native thoughts. He’d discovered that Thrawn’s mind was not some nebulous construct which was somehow capable of inserting statements and questions into Eli’s head; it was, rather, a highly-ordered and decipherable scientific object which Eli could investigate at his own leisure. It was aligned, he found, not unlike his own, in sets of numbers and brief, blocky lists.

The details of it were entirely opaque to him still. The structure, however, was intensely familiar. It could have been his own mind staring back at him, mirrored and translated into a language he still didn’t know. 

He found it quite easy now to force his own thoughts into that space. He supposed it was the taste he’d had of Thrawn’s blood. 

_ They’ll never cease, _ said Eli gloomily, staring down at the dried blue pigment which had rubbed off a glass vial and onto his hands. _ I’ve quite run out of clean handkerchiefs to absorb the blood. _

A brief image of foreign nature flashed into his mind, thrust forward by Thrawn: rags soaking in a washbasin of cool water, the blood leaking out of the fabric slowly and completely, waiting for a final scrub to remove what little spots of red remained.

_ Yes, thank you, _ Eli said, perhaps a bit waspishly. _ I know how to clean them. _

The sensation he received this time was more like a memory of an unpleasant smell wafting from the clothes Eli had worn for nearly a week when he first arrived at Pellaeon House — before he’d accepted that this stay was more permanent than he hoped, before he found fresh clothes and laundered the old ones. It came to him with a polite sense of doubt.

Offended, Eli put down a mental block at the vaguely-conceived border between them and the cold, distant presence of Thrawn’s mind dissipated. He felt the raw skin of his nostrils gingerly and checked his fingers — there were flecks of blood on them, red but mostly dry, turning the blue pigment a dark color closer to brown than purple. He’d stopped bleeding, then. At last. 

He threw the red kerchief onto a growing pile of them, stiff and brass-colored, on his vanity by the washbasin. He turned to the frost-rimmed window, his nose still stinging from the sudden bleed — why did it hurt so, anyway? Nosebleeds were typically painless, were they not? Yet his were always precluded by a small, sharp pain, like something deep inside his nose — inside his brain — had snapped. 

He shook the thoughts away and leaned his forehead against the cold window, letting his hair serve as a buffer between his skin and the glass. Outside, the grounds were heavy with snow, the fields turned white and blinding beneath a cool sun, the trees barren. 

Perhaps it was the emptiness of the trees which allowed him to spot the rider coming through them. 

For a moment, Eli couldn’t put any stock by what he saw; he dismissed the sight out of hand. It was so incredible to think anyone would come to Lycia House now, after all that had happened, all that had gone wrong. With a body in the root cellar and his horse dead in the stable — with Thrawn’s thoughts infringing on his own — Eli couldn’t bear the thought of someone coming through the grounds now.

They broke through the trees and into the unblemished snow, a small figure on a large, dark horse which picked its hooves up high, kicking clumps of white up everywhere it went. Eli stared out the window — looking _ at _ it more than he looked through it, his eyes blank — until the rider had nearly reached the stable.

There, the rider hesitated, perhaps smelling ice-scrimmed death from several feet away, perhaps catching sight of Helminth’s body lurking on the ground. And that was when Eli recognized him, for indeed he’d seen this rider before.

It was the telegram delivery boy who’d summoned him to this goddamned house.

_ Christ, _ Eli thought to himself. Abruptly, he pulled the barricade back up, seeking out Thrawn’s mind and dragging it toward him until they were close enough to communicate. He did not get the chance to ask a question or make accusations; he was so focused on the boy outside that Thrawn caught the image before Eli could say a word.

He got the odd sense that Thrawn had stepped up to Eli’s eyes and was using them as a window to stare into the front lawn.

_ He’s come for you, _ said Thrawn dispassionately. Eli could feel him edging away; with a supreme, straining effort, risking a nasty headache, Eli pulled him back, forcing Thrawn to observe with him as the boy ushered the horse to the side of the stable and dismounted, tying him sloppily to an old, rotten post.

If it was the same delivery boy, Eli thought, and if the boy had been honest when he said he’d received the telegram from the station and not from Pellaeon or Thrawn himself, then it stood to reason the boy was indeed here because someone was in need of a doctor. And only the boy, after all, would know that the physician had disappeared after an urgent telegram from Lycia House. 

_ Well reasoned, Doctor, _ said Thrawn approvingly — as though he’d had anything to do with it. Disgruntled, Eli waved Thrawn off and watched as the boy approached the house. 

Before Pellaeon’s death, Eli would have leapt with joy at the sight of a stranger on a horse. Now, he felt strangely reticent and protective of the house; his shoulders grew tighter and tighter as he watched the boy stomp his way through the snow to the front door. 

He genuinely didn’t know if he would leave his perch at the window when called. But when the boy knocked, Eli found his feet moving automatically, guiding him quickly out of his room and down the stairs. In the parlour, he hesitated again, his eye caught by the great translucent sculpture on its pedestal. 

_ This spine you see here, _ Pellaeon had said, _ is venomous. _

_ Used for protection. _

Suddenly, Eli felt unfathomably cold. He shook the thought away — and the shiver that came with it — and put all his weight into opening the heavy front door. 

The boy stared at him with blank dull eyes, unsurprised to find Eli here, unimpressed by the mansion, unaware of the dark thoughts swirling inside Eli’s head.

“Oh, it’s you, sir,” he said blandly. “Come along, then.”

He half-turned, waiting for Eli to follow — and Eli, of course, did not move. He stared at the boy uncomprehendingly, his eyebrows drawn up in a polite, inquisitive manner. If he’d seen the expression on his own face, he would have recognized it and scowled.

“There’s someone ill in the village, sir,” said the boy, looking over his shoulder at Eli. After a beat, a hint of confusion entered his face. “He’s in need of a doctor,” he said more firmly. 

He took a step back onto the threshold. Eli looked down at himself, dressed only in a thick rib cord shirt derived from fustian fabric, thin day-wear trousers he’d pilfered from Pellaeon’s closet, and a pair of socks. He lifted his chin again, looking past the boy at the blinding snow, thick on the ground and swirling through the air in fat sweeps.

The boy seemed not to notice his dilemma. “He’s going fast, sir,” he said impatiently.

“I’ll be along,” said Eli. His voice sounded distant and numb to his own ears. He was already turning back to the staircase, dizzy and grasping at the bannister. “I need to dress.” On the bottom step, he paused, turning halfway back to the boy who still stood outside, the door wide open.

“You’re welcome to come inside,” said Eli genially. “You may appreciate that statue there — it’s of a ghost shark. Note the parasite lurking behind its gills.”

* * *

They saw no one on their long, cold journey into town. The residence to which the boy led them was not far from Eli’s own practice, a fact which would have left him swimming in relief a month before. Now, he scarcely noted it, and only then to craft a mental list of supplies he might retrieve when this was done.

He dismounted the horse, not bothering to tie it, and stopped the boy from slipping off the saddle after him. When he placed his hand on the boy’s arm, he felt no warmth beneath the child’s coat.

“Here,” said Eli, and he pressed a coin into the boy’s hand, transferring blue smudges from his own cold fingers to the boy’s already grubby skin. “Rent me a horse and cart from Mr. Elridge and bring it to me here. I’d like it within the hour, you understand? Pocket none of the money. I shall need the services for no less than a week.”

Silently, the boy nodded. He wrenched his arm away from Eli’s fingers, closing his hand into a fist over the coin; suddenly he seemed quite pale. 

“Within an hour,” he mumbled, lips tight, and before Eli could confirm his orders or make any additions, the boy had flicked the reins and taken off. 

Slowly, Eli turned to the sickhouse behind him — for it was certainly that. It was as quiet already as Pellaeon’s family plot, the windows shrouded in black; he expected to find no doting family members inside nursing the patient to health. The house belonged to an old man he knew from the few years he’d been in practice here, a man who had managed to outlive all his children, all his brothers, both his wives.

Wordlessly, Eli stepped inside. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, all he could see were dust motes floating in the air — and when his eyes adjusted to the dust, he was confronted with a wasted old man who was lying in bed half-dead.

It was an all-too-familiar sight to Eli — to any doctor. Still, he felt his heart plummet as he took in the waxy skin, the pallor, the cold sweat. He swallowed back a sigh.

“Sir,” said Eli, stepping to the old man’s side. The scent of human waste was thick in the air; he located a spindly wooden chair and pulled it up to the bedside, ensuring as he sat that no article of his borrowed clothing touched the bedspread. 

He could tell from a single look that there was nothing he could do, beyond the requisite attempts to drug the patient into a blissful sleep. The old man’s eyes were already coated in a thin blue film; his mouth hung open, saliva crusted yellow on the corners of his mouth. His breathing was weak and rasping; his pulse, when Eli took it, was thready.

“Sir,” Eli said, “can you tell me your name?”

The old man gave no reply. The breath whistled out from in-between his few remaining teeth. Both of them had long since turned brown; they gave off a rotting odor which mingled with the smell of imminent death so thickly Eli could scarcely tell which was which.

“Can you tell me my name?” asked Eli. After so long in Lycia House, it felt strange to him to speak aloud and _ solely _ aloud, without the flood of broadcasted images and senses he’d become so used to sending. His jaw felt tight and strained with every word, like he was stretching it to its limits merely by opening his mouth.

“Vanto,” said the old man. His voice was as weak as his breathing; it came out as a wheeze through cracked lips. He did not focus his eyes on Eli.

“That’s correct,” said Eli. Truthfully, he was surprised to receive a reply. “Can you tell me what ails you, sir?”

The answer was succinct and accurate.

“Dying,” the man said. Eli pursed his lips; before he could think of a comforting response, the man continued, “Stroke.”

It came out _ ‘stoke _ .’ And Eli doubted very much that there _ had _ been a stroke, for he’d seen the old man recover from one before, and it had been a painfully sluggish process; there had been months without speaking, months of spoon-feeding and nursemaiding. This, Eli suspected, was nothing more than the failure of an ancient body after a long, long life.

“You’ve been away,” the old man breathed, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I called for you.”

“I’m here now,” said Eli stiffly. He took the man’s hand gingerly, flipping it palm-up to feel the pulse there rather than at the old man’s neck. He grimaced at the faint blue smears he left on the old man’s skin; rubbing at them only seemed to grind them further into those waxy pores. “I’ve been with Mr. Pellaeon of Lycia House, you see. He’s very ill.”

It went without saying, of course, that the old man was quite ill, too, and Eli’s face grew hot as the silence drew out, taking on an accusatory tone. He hoped the old man would not mention it; there was little Eli could do, as the sole physician in the town — and he’d been stranded anyway. The boy should have come for him sooner. 

Pulse taken (still thready), Eli tucked the old man’s hand against his side and settled back into his chair, feeling the wooden spats dig into his spine.

“Pellaeon,” the old man said. Eli nodded once, his hands clasped in his lap. He turned his eyes to the window, half-wondering when the boy would return, half-waiting for the old man to fade away.

“Pellaeon,” the man murmured, quieter now. And then, with a weak hack of a cough, he said, “Not Car’das?”

Eli’s eyes were on him in a flash. “What?” he said sharply. “What did you say, sir?”

It took the old man an agonizing eternity to organize his thoughts, to force the words out between trembling lips.

“It’s Car’das … who lives at Lycia House,” he said. “Jorj Car’das.”

And then: “He paints in town. He makes those … ghastly portraits of a corpse.”

And then, before the last word had quite been finished, the old man was asleep. Not dead, Eli noted with a mixture of relief and concern, watching that thin chest rise and fall. Just asleep. 

And Eli had nothing to do but stare at the window and wait for his new horse and cart to arrive.

* * *

He left a token stock of laudanum behind with the old man, the bottle clearly labeled and left in plain sight on the bedside table, and gave the boy strict instructions for dosage and use; if nothing else, it would give the old man a pleasant end. As he left, he located the old man’s washbasin — half-empty and containing only cold water — and washed the remainder of the blue pigment off his hands.

He scrubbed them until they were red.

The horse procured for him from Elridge’s was older than Helminth had been but appeared suitably strong; the cart had been fitted with thick wheels adequate for the snow. The first place Eli took it was to his own house on the edge of town, where he loaded it with a trunk of his own clothes. It would be a godsend to get out of the ill-fitting garments of a dead man. 

He replenished the stock of medicines in his saddle bag and steered the cart next to the small marketplace near the center of town, where he could purchase foodstock as well as grain for the horse. He patted its muzzle as the cart was loaded up by a pair of stockboys who eyed him almost suspiciously after his long absence from the town.

The horse accepted a slice of apple from his palm gladly, its lips catching on Eli’s skin. Eli smiled, then sent a thought toward Thrawn.

_ Don’t kill this one, _he said.

At this distance, he wasn’t sure the message would be received. He adjusted the horse’s bridle before clambering into the seat of the cart behind the reins. The boy had arranged for Eli to keep the horse until his next visit into town, at which point he would purchase further time as needed; as he steered it away from town, back onto the snow-covered road which led to Lycia House, he wondered where he would keep it.

Not the stables, surely. Not with Helminth’s body in plain view. 

He mused on the old man’s words as he made the long trek back. It was ill-advised, of course, to consider the words of an elderly, dying man with any sort of weight or seriousness — it was most likely, Eli thought, that Lycia House _ had _ belonged to a family by the name of Car’das before passing into Mr. Pellaeon’s hands. It was likely, too, that this legitimate purchase of the manor had occurred quietly, outside the old man’s scope of news, or that he had learned of it at the time and since forgotten.

Still, it needled Eli on his journey back. He scratched frequently at his palms, imagining that he could still feel motes of the dried pigment hidden deep in his skin like metal shavings. 

He should like to learn more about Jorj Car’das. Eli’s inventory of Lycia House had turned up a great deal of paintings in the same disturbing vein as _ Coal Miner and Hookworm. _ Some had been the same type of unintelligible landscape — thin, dark shapes suggesting barren trees, or great black pools which might potentially be representations of the sea. Others, though, had been portraits, and those disturbed Eli the most.

They had been distorted beyond anything Eli had ever seen — like the medical illustrations he’d seen during his education, picturing gouty legs and leprous sores, but without the orderliness, the logic, the realism. These portraits were more like warped whispers than anything else — like faces Eli had seen in his dreams. 

He didn’t like to dwell on those melting faces. He told himself they must have become damaged during storage, or that they were simply unfinished, that every painting started life this way. Deep down, he knew this wasn’t true.

_ I’ll have to ask Thrawn, _ Eli thought, grimacing at the prospect, at the circular evasion he was sure to receive.

He was close enough to Lycia House now to receive a faint glimmer of amusement in response.

* * *

For lack of a better solution, Eli tied his new horse to the same rotten post the delivery boy had used earlier that day. It would do, he judged, until he gathered his strength and removed Helminth’s body from the stable — or else strong-armed Thrawn into helping him. 

The other man made his appearance at the doorway as Eli was carrying the first bundle of foodstuffs from the cart. He smiled despite himself, despite the cold snow soaking into his shoes and trouser legs. He could feel Thrawn picking over his memories, gleaning what he could from the vague sensations and images circling in Eli’s mind.

Wordlessly, Thrawn moved past Eli toward the cart. He stopped on his way there to examine the horse, his eyes glinting.

Eli hadn’t realize he had hesitated on the doorstep, the bundle heavy in his arms, until Thrawn said to him, _ We don’t need supervision, Doctor Vanto. I won’t kill it. _

Surprised, Eli could only watch as Thrawn raised his hand to the horse’s muzzle; it allowed him to pet it without protest or even a disgruntled snort. If it feared Thrawn, as animals often innately fear predators, it gave no sign.

So Eli turned and deposited the bundle of food in the buttry, and as he returned he passed Thrawn in the hall, carrying Eli’s trunk of clothes with ease.

_ To my room, please, _ Eli said, flashing Thrawn an image of the spot at the foot of his bed where he wished the trunk to be placed. And then, before Thrawn had the chance to put his inquisitive underthoughts into words, Eli said, _ It’s only clothes. _

Satisfied, Thrawn disappeared up the staircase with it, leaving Eli to tackle the rest of the cart himself. When he returned, he showed no interest in Eli’s organization of the freshly-stocked buttry, only sparing it a single curious glance before moving on. He brushed Eli’s shoulder as he passed by, sending a cold thrill through Eli’s chest.

“Thrawn,” he said aloud; he winced at the sound of his voice echoing in the empty kitchen. “The patient I saw today said something strange to me.”

Thrawn was standing on the edge of the root cellar’s trapdoor, as had become his habit lately. He had ceased his trips into the cellar only at Eli’s gentle (and, when that proved ineffective, less gentle) insistence. Now, he contented himself with standing directly above the entrance with his toes edging onto the door; if he could do so without leaving the house, Eli suspected he would instead stand over the exact spot where Pellaeon’s body lay.

_ Strange? _ Thrawn repeated, and he turned those red-filmed eyes on Eli with yet another flicker of amusement. A brief series of images raced past Eli’s eyes, broadcasted by Thrawn: his own blue skin, the isolation of Lycia House, _ Coal Miner and Hookworm, _ Pellaeon’s body beneath their feet, Helminth dead in the stable, leeches lying dormant in a jar.

The family plot.

“That’s exactly it,” said Eli severely, and he would be lying if he claimed not to relish the surprise which flashed over Thrawn’s face. “The family plot — whose family is it? Not Pellaeon’s, I noticed.” 

He watched as Thrawn’s eyes shuttered and his face turned blank as uncarved stone. The barricade forced itself down between their minds so gradually that Eli couldn’t at first be sure it was there.

“The graves all share the surname Car’das,” Eli said. “And that’s what my patient said, too — that this house belonged to a man named Jorj Car’das, not to Gilad Pellaeon.”

When Thrawn answered, it was in a carefully neutral voice, a bit faint as he forced it through the barricade. _ That knowledge is beyond me. I have been here only two years. _

“So you never met Jorj Car’das?” Eli challenged, and of course he received no answer. Silently, Thrawn stared down at the trapdoor beneath his feet, his eyebrows drawing into something near to a frown. “I’ve seen his paintings throughout the house,” said Eli. “Portraits and landscapes. And I assume he did the one hanging in the hall.”

_ Coal Miner and Hookworm, _ Thrawn supplied.

“I’m _ brutally _ aware,” said Eli. He scowled for a moment thinking of the painting which had haunted him every time he moved down that hall. “Those traveling chests are his, I suppose.”

Thrawn cocked his head.

“The ones in the sick-room,” Eli said. “They’re filled with dried pigments for oil painting, the kind artists used to mix themselves.”

_ A reasonable deduction, _Thrawn allowed, dipping his chin. Eli did his best to shrug off the irritation which sparked inside him at that comment.

“Well, you’re sure they didn’t belong to Pellaeon?” he asked.

_ Yes, quite. _

“Because Jorj Car’das seems to have mixed an unusual amount of blue pigment,” Eli continued, eyes narrowed. He was close enough to Thrawn to grab him by the sleeve and pull his hand into the light. Thrawn allowed this sudden contact with a look of polite curiosity; he examined his fingers when Eli pulled them up, then transferred his gaze to Eli’s face and studied that instead, hiding a smile. “This precise shade of blue,” said Eli, brushing a thumb over Thrawn’s skin. “What could he be painting with that? Certainly none of the landscapes I’ve seen thus far. Certainly none of the portraits.”

_ Cornflowers, perhaps, _ said Thrawn blithely. _ We see a large number of those in the marsh come spring. _

“Based solely on what I’ve seen of his work,” said Eli, “I somehow doubt he ever painted a flower.”

He released Thrawn’s hand and Thrawn lowered it gradually back to his side, his eyes still on Eli. Eli stared back, waiting — hoping — for Thrawn to break the silence first, to give him something he could use or at the very least analyze. 

He was relieved (and stunned) when Thrawn obliged.

_ You’ve completed a thorough inventory of Lycia House, _ said Thrawn. _ Tell me what you’ve learned. _

With a sigh, Eli retreated to a crooked wooden chair near the kitchen table and lowered himself into it; Thrawn remained where he was, planted near the trap door, his eyes following Eli’s movements across the room.

“I’ve found a great deal of portraits, naturally,” he said. “Some of them are quite ancient; adequately crafted but not extraordinary. The more recent lot are all done by the same hand, to include the unfinished portrait in your room.”

He hesitated there, waiting for Thrawn to absorb the information. It was possible — likely, in fact — that Thrawn already knew about Eli’s intrusions into his private space, but thus far he had declined to acknowledge it. Now it was out in the open. 

_ Self-portrait, _ Thrawn corrected with a slight nod of his head. 

“Self-portrait,” Eli amended automatically. His mind was spinning with the new information, working quickly to find the section of his brain devoted to Car’das, moving the half-finished portrait of the white-haired man from a neatly ordered list of paintings to become the new image of Car’das in his head. “And you know it’s a self-portrait how?” he asked.

Thrawn’s only response was a smile.

_ Lift the barricade, _ said Eli brusquely, allowing some of his frustration to seep through. Thrawn brushed that thought aside as though he had not heard it. 

Perhaps he hadn’t. 

_ What else? _ he prompted.

“The letters in your desk,” said Eli. The frustration had now leaked into his voice, though it sounded somehow more like accusation. “They were signed by Jorj Car’das and addressed to a certain Mitth’raw’nuruodo, written in the same foreign script which you used as dubious proof of literacy upon our first meeting.”

_ Am I illiterate? _ asked Thrawn wryly, quirking an eyebrow. 

If Thrawn could brush aside questions, Eli could, too. He deftly ignored this one.

_ You pronounce my name remarkably well, for one with no instruction, _ Thrawn said. _ Though I expect you’ve been practicing. _

“You pronounce mine adequately as well,” said Eli stiffly. The corner of Thrawn’s lips lifted briefly, encouraging Eli to move on. “You admit it is your name,” he said. “Ergo you admit Car’das addressed those letters to you — meaning he did know you, quite well, in fact.” He narrowed his eyes at Thrawn. “Meaning you lied.”

_ Did I say I never knew him? _ asked Thrawn mildly.

“Yes,” said Eli — though looking back on it, he couldn’t recall Thrawn’s precise words, or whether he’d ever answered that particular question at all.

_ I knew him, _ said Thrawn. A simple, easy admission, one that left Thrawn’s face placid and at ease. Eli was wary, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some sort of reversal.

“And?” he asked when Thrawn was unforthcoming.

_ And, _ Thrawn said, _ I am quite sure he painted cornflowers from time to time. _

* * *

Helminth’s body was removed from the stable an hour later, when the snow started to come down with a fury. Eli was glad for the sudden mild blizzard; it obscured his view of the scene from the bedroom window. Thrawn, it turned out, had acquiesced to the gruesome job without a fight, only nodding at Eli’s suggestion that he clear the stable out and make room for the new horse. He made no indication that to do this alone would be a hardship, though surely any man would struggle to drag a dead horse from one place to another.

Thrawn accepted most jobs easily, Eli mused. He had kept the cleanliness of Lycia House up to standard since Pellaeon’s passing, and possibly for quite some time before. He had transported Pellaeon’s body both to and from the graveyard, even in his weakened state, and he was always willing to assist Eli in his inventory, particularly when a piece of furniture needed to be moved.

He was a helpful sort, when he wasn’t lurking in root cellars drinking his own blood.

The snow blurred everything outside together into one pale smudge, so all Eli could see was the dark mass of Helminth’s body and the flashes of blue from Thrawn’s face and ungloved hands. The wet trail left by Helminth’s corpse was quickly swallowed up in a fresh, blessed layer of white, leaving Eli with little to chew on and little to haunt his dreams.

An hour later, Thrawn returned from the forest, stamping his way through the snow with his head down, snowflakes peppering his hair. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders hunched; otherwise, he seemed hardly affected by the cold. He stopped by the old rotten post to untie the new horse, one hand coming up to stroke its neck, and led it inside.

Eli turned away from the window as soon as Thrawn was out of sight. He rested a hand on the glass lid of the jar where his five remaining leeches rested, waiting out the winter in the relative warmth and safety of Eli’s room. He examined them for a while, tracking the minute twitches of their bodies, trying to discern where their mouths began. Then, with a sigh, he turned away from them and studied instead the collection of portraits he’d accumulated against the far wall.

They were Car’das’s, all of them — dark, twisting portraits of screaming men, their faces blurred, their features nothing but a deformed swirl of flesh tones. There were no colors here approaching the blue of Thrawn’s skin (nor anything, Eli noted, quite so brown as his own). He crouched before the nearest painting, running his fingers over a stroke of red which covered the subject’s broken cheek.

What value had Pellaeon seen in these paintings? If it were Eli’s decision, he would have burned them all upon purchasing the house; certainly he wouldn’t have left them piled against the walls.

But perhaps it _ hadn’t _ been Pellaeon’s choice. If Thrawn had known Car’das, it stood to reason he’d been here prior to Pellaeon’s acquisition of Lycia House — which made it quite likely, too, that the story Eli had been spun of Thrawn and Pellaeon’s first meeting was nothing more than a fairy tale. Unless, of course, the two events coincided — Pellaeon’s discovery of Thrawn unconscious in the snow and his acquisition of Lycia House from Jorj Car’das, all on the same day.

Perhaps he could add Car’das’s death to that list of inopportune events, Eli mused. He chewed on the inside of his cheek as he stared at the painting, his thumb still planted over the brushstroke of red. Or at least he could attribute that death to the same week, perhaps no more than five days before Pellaeon found Thrawn half-frozen. 

If he’d had the same strange relationship with Car’das which he seemed to share with Pellaeon — and considering how quickly he’d wasted to nothing when Pellaeon fell ill — then it stood to reason, didn’t it, that he might have fallen where he stood and lay there unconscious until Lycia House’s new owner (a distant relative? An old army friend? Had Pellaeon come by the manor honestly at all?) arrived and found him there, coated in snow. 

There was a sharp, stinging bite in his nose and Eli lifted his head back automatically, keeping his eyes on the painting. He had no clean handkerchiefs with which to stifle the bloodflow.

Behind him, one of the leeches leapt in its jar, breaking the surface, making a splash.

The door opened.

“Thrawn,” Eli said by way of greeting. The sound was muffled as he raised a hand to cover his nose — the same hand which had been examining the stroke of red on the portrait. Silently, Thrawn knelt beside him, eyes flickering over the painting and then to Eli. He extricated a dark square of cloth from his coat and held it out for Eli to take.

Eli took it, thinking _ And where have you been hiding this? _with as much venom as he could muster, considering the pile of sullied kerchiefs on his vanity was no one’s fault but his own. He held the pocket square to his nose; it was certainly clean. Freshly laundered, he suspected, with a scent like wild violets clinging to it.

“You disposed of the body?” he asked, now sounding frightfully nasal. Thrawn nodded, settling cross-legged next to Eli on the floor. He examined the portrait; like Eli had, he raised his hand and settled his thumb over the brush of red on the subject’s cheek.

_ It speaks to his personality, _ said Thrawn, and there was no mistaking the trace of sadness thrumming through his mind. _ It speaks, too, to the unique structure of his mind. You’ve never encountered a portrait like this in any English home. _

It wasn’t a question, but the nod Eli gave to it was firm.

_ He was quicker than Pellaeon, _Thrawn said. Quicker at what, he didn’t specify. He turned his eyes on Eli, his expression severe, and for a moment Eli didn’t so much as breathe. The fingers around the pocket square clenched involuntarily, squeezing a few more drops of blood out of Eli’s nose. 

Thrawn pulled his hand away from the portrait, letting it drop so that it covered Eli’s on the floor. Eli could feel the still-healing cut on Thrawn’s palm, the ragged edges of it brushing his knuckles. There was blood on Thrawn’s hands now, he thought giddily, and blood on his own, soaking onto his fingers through the kerchief against his nose. And blood on the painting, real or imagined. Blood they’d both touched.

_ He was slower than you, _ Thrawn said.

* * *

Eli returned to town at the end of the week dressed in his own clothes, with a stomach full of proper food. There were only three objects on his mind: to replenish the buttry as needed; to check up on the elderly patient; and of course, to renew his rent on the horse and cart. 

The horse nickered as it dragged the cart the last few meters to the butchery, eager for a rest. It had grown fond of Eli over the past seven days, or so Eli liked to think. He reached a hand up to its neck, paused mid-air as it shook snow out of its mane, and then gave it a final pat before he retreated indoors.

He stopped short in the doorway. The counters had been draped in black cloth. The young man behind it wore black gloves and a matching cravat with his suit — mourning clothes. They looked peculiar on his lanky frame; the cravat was stiff against his neck, clearly new and not yet broken in, and it didn’t match the patchy beard growing against it. 

“I’m sorry,” said Eli, his mind tracking over the residents of town, trying to place the deceased before it became expected of him to procure a name. The likeliest candidate, his own elderly patient, was also the easiest to rule out: he had no family to care for him, let alone to mourn his passing.

The young man nodded solemnly. His gloves creaked when he reached behind the counter for the list Eli had left with him last week.

“My brother,” he said hoarsely, without being prompted.

“Ah,” said Eli, looking away. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the young man examine the list with red-rimmed eyes before reaching beneath the glass frame for a pound of ham, already wrapped. The young man seemed to work both behind the counter and in the back room; there was dark blood speckled on his sleeves.

“He’s the second one this week,” said the young man. He was blinking far too rapidly for Eli’s comfort. Eli folded his hands in front of him and kept his eyes averted, staring at a rat-chewed corner in the wall.

“The second,” he repeated with a polite amount of surprise.

“First the oldest person in the village,” said the young man, confirming at least that Eli’s patient had passed away, “then one of the youngest. He weren’t even working yet, aught for the telegram job.”

At this, Eli froze, his eyes wide and still fixed on the corner. After a moment, he finally turned his head to look at the young man. Looking at him now, he saw features which were overly familiar to him — a snub nose and oblong lips, ears that were a little bit too small. All features he’d seen in the boy who delivered his telegram and fetched him from Lycia House.

“How old was he?” Eli asked. The young man behind the counter bent again, this time fetching for Eli a block of cheese which he placed beside the ham. He consulted the list, chin trembling behind his scant beard.

“Ten,” he said. “Wasted away. No one knows—” His voice broke; he hid his face by ducking down behind the counter, busying himself with the remainder of Eli’s list. “Consumption, I guess,” he said.

When his order was complete, Eli accepted it without a word, pressing the money into the young man’s leather-clad hand. He hurried back into the snow, packing the fresh goods deep into the cart, stacked so they wouldn’t fall in the long ride home. He drove the horse past the elderly man’s house next, just to be sure -- the dark curtains had been harvested by some quick-witted busybody, leaving the windows bare.

Eli left the cart and cupped his hands against the cold glass, peering inside. The bed was empty; it had been stripped entirely, leaving nothing but a few dark stains on a ratty mattress stuffed with hay. The rest of the furniture was gone, parceled out between the old man’s neighbors.

The rest was nothing but dust.

He paid his rent for a fortnight and returned silently to Lycia House.

* * *

“You filled my washbasin with dried violets once,” Eli said when he returned home. “Do you have anymore.”

Silently, Thrawn looked up from the floor, where his feet were planted firmly on the root cellar’s trap door. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands clasped behind his back, and gave Eli’s mind a thorough search.

He scanned the images of black leather gloves and new cravats -- the stripped windows of the old man’s home — the brush of Eli’s hands against Thrawn’s cheeks the day Pellaeon died — those same hands touching the delivery boy’s palm and then his patient’s wrist, checking for a pulse. 

_ In the washroom adjacent to Pellaeon’s quarters, _ Thrawn said. _ What you call the sick-room. You’ll find them in sachets, clearly marked. _

Eli didn’t bother to acknowledge these words, even with a nod. He swept out of the kitchen, leaving Thrawn there and the cart unpacked outside. He still wore his winter coat and gloves as he bounded up the stairs and into Pellaeon’s sick-room, tossing aside the contents of the washroom until he found what he was looking for: six sachets, each of them crafted from coarse material and thick with herbs. 

It was simple enough to find the one he wanted, though he couldn’t explain, now or ever, why he wanted it. The bags were indeed marked clearly, with careful calligraphy printed on each one. Eli took the one marked _ Violets _ and brought it to the standing sink, not bothering to return to his room. 

When the water ran from these pipes, it warmed faster than the ones in Eli’s room; it ran darker, too, and took longer to clear.

Plague bags — that’s what these used to be called. Eli remembered that from his grandmother. Superstitious old people wore them around their necks or at their belts to ward off any terrible thing they could think of: vile humours, miasmata.

Parasites.

He poured the murky water down the drain and set the washbasin from Pellaeon’s sick-room in the sink; he tied the sachet beneath the faucet, where the water gushing out was now hot and clean. The scent of violets filled the room within seconds, searing away all evil thoughts lurking in Eli’s brain.

He washed his hands beneath the scalding stream.

He washed them again. He dug his nails into his pores, into the lines which creased his palms, imagining he could feel something almost invisible there, could almost see something minuscule and black (or blue? Deep blue, like a bruise? Like cornflowers?) skittering away from his searching nails, crowding into the wrinkles of his hands — some small animalcule or flea carrying disease, transferring from one man’s hand to the next. Feeding on them.

He watched his hands turn red, then white. He dug black specks out of his skin.

He scrubbed them again.

* * *

They made no mention of the sachet hiding beneath Eli’s shirt, against his chest. This one was unmarked; he’d found it not in the washroom but in the drawer of Pellaeon’s bedside table, hastily and clumsily stitched.

The scent of it comforted Eli, soothed those squirming parts of his brain which insisted they could still see little dark insects burrowing into his hands, waiting to leap out of their flesh-chewed, raw, red holes and onto someone else’s exposed skin. It was a woody, musk-filled scent — warm and sensual, with notes of hazelnut and sweet tobacco, earthy vetiver and something he didn’t want to think about, something which leaked blue petals when he cut into the sachet with his pocket knife. 

He found it difficult to sleep at night. He could feel Thrawn’s consciousness at the edge of his own — muted for the sake of politeness, but not asleep. It was all background noise to Eli; the quiet thrumming of Thrawn’s mind, never ceasing, had become like an echo to his own.

And he couldn’t quiet his own brain, either. Not really. So he found something else to do.

When it was dark, he lit a candle and brought it with him into the hall, and he sat on the polished floor in nothing but his dressing gown, staring at the painting which always seemed to stare at him.

_ Coal Miner and Hookworm. _

He was intimately familiar with its details. The loamy swirl of paint seemed like something he’d washed off his hands after Helminth died — like the pungent, dark water which flowed from the pipes. What bothered him more was the glint beneath this heavy black pool, the hint of something shining underneath.

Leeches, he’d thought once. Leeches in a dirty pond — or, more true to the painting’s gruesome title, a scarcely-visible worm covered in mud and waste. 

He touched the edge of his thumbnail to the paint. It was oil, and it had long since oxidized; it had been mixed with linseed oil, drying fast. When he scraped at it, thick flakes of it came free, lodging themselves beneath his nails. There, they turned gooey and black, like he’d been digging in the mud.

He moved his hand up to the nearest glimmer he could reach — that hint of something waiting down below. He scraped at it mindlessly, one layer after another. Soon, he told himself, he would see nothing but smudged grey canvas. Soon both the glimmer and the mud would be gone. 

He peeled the paint back, and underneath he caught a glimpse of cornflower blue.

He expanded the circle of exposed oil paint, digging his nails in deeper, raking them harder and harder across the unprotected canvas. The black miasma of mud and waste unspooled itself, unravelled to reveal a sullied, formerly bright shade he’d seen a thousand times before — dried powder in glass vials, hand-crushed and neglected, not present in any of the portraits he’d unearthed.

When the picture became clear, Eli let his hands drop to his side, his shoulders aching. He rested on his heels.

The glimmer beneath the surface was not a leech, not a worm. The glimmer seemed hardly intentional at all. It was a remnant of some other painting entirely, covered up hastily with shades of grey and black and set into a frame, renamed. 

Beneath _ Coal Miner and Hookworm, _ Eli had uncovered approximately five square inches of the original portrait. 

He had uncovered a slender, blue-skinned hand.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Hope you guys like it, but make sure you heed the tags!! All of them apply to this chapter. Also make sure to check out RAZZMATAZZz's artwork, it's linked at the end and it's super good!

A wild sheep found its way onto the grounds in midwinter, its coat overgrown and matted, threatening to consume the thin pink sinews hidden underneath. As Eli watched from the edge of the woods, it placed its hoof on a branch of dead elm half-covered in snow; trying to jump the hurdle, it instead slipped and placed its feet down all akimbo. When it took another step, it moved slightly to the left.

Another step, another degree to the left. Eli followed it, his own footsteps silent, his movements slow. He wanted only to keep it in sight.

It was rotating in a circle, he realized as he followed it four more steps — a glance back at his own footprints showed a steady, haphazard curve. It had been traveling that way for miles, he suspected, gaining headway as its circles increased in diameter and grew more lopsided with every step.

On spindly legs, unaware of Eli’s presence, it wobbled and swerved to the left once more. Its eyes caught the light; they were filmy and blank, with specks floating in the dark expanse of its irides.

It was ill, of course. From the way it moved, the telltale lack of balance, Eli would guess the pathetic creature had been beset by gid. If he or Thrawn cracked open its skull they would find the larvae of worms hidden in the coils of its brain, little white lumps squirming in the pink, waiting for someone to peel the folds back and expose them to the sun. The lesions those worms left on the brain as they grew — and fed, and grew some more — eventually caused the sheep to stumble about in circles, chronically incapable of walking a straight line.

He paced ahead of the sheep, no longer bothering to disguise his footsteps; the sheep heard him and froze, then lurched forward in an attempt to escape from danger — by taking another step forward and slightly to the left. If it kept on its path, it would plunge into a stagnant pool of water deeper in the woods; Eli eyed the scrim of ice over the pond and doubted very much that even an emaciated wild sheep could walk across it without breaking through.

It would freeze to death, then — or it would drown if the pool were deep enough. Eli approached the sheep again; it saw him, tried to evade him, and failed. He put his hands into its coat, deeper and coarser and dirtier than he thought it was, and felt his fingers sinking in, grabbing at nothing. 

He tried to lift the sheep and set it on a different course; it bucked in his grip and his fingers closed on nothing but wool and the carapaces of a dozen dead insects which had dried into its coat and would never be combed out. Escaping from him, screaming in alarm, the sheep pushed forward in a wobbly run, still set on its path to the pool.

He tried again; it took only a few brisk steps to catch up to it. This time his palms only grazed the sheep’s thin sides — he felt it breathing for just a moment — before it wailed and bucked away, its rear hoof catching Eli on the shin. Cursing, the back of his neck numb from the snow, Eli made one more token effort. He grit his teeth and gripped the sheep beneath its ribs, hugging it to his chest as he lifted it. He dumped it shortly afterward, several yards to the east and facing the opposite direction. 

It took a step forward and its legs gave out. It collapsed onto its chest, still screaming; finally, it pushed to its feet with an effort and wandered off, and Eli watched it go. He was so close to the pool now that if he stepped back just an inch, his heels would crunch down on that thin layer of ice over the water

This, he reflected, must have been where Thrawn found his leeches. Eli had explored the grounds thoroughly, and this was the only source of water he’d found thus far. The pool was so dark it appeared black and viscous — he could almost imagine it was a pit of frozen mud.

Inspecting his red, raw hands, he found a fragment of a beetle’s shell stuck beneath his fingernail from where he’d clutched the sheep’s wild coat. He picked it out absently, stabbing at the tender flesh of his nail-bed with twisted satisfaction.

He threw the shell over his shoulder and heard the faint clack as it hit ice on the surface of the dark pool.

* * *

_ It’s nothing, _ said Thrawn.

“It’s _ something,” _ Eli insisted. At the window, Thrawn stood with his back to Eli and his hands crossed behind him, palms flat in a militaristic style. He didn’t bother to turn his head at the sound of Eli’s voice; he only uncrossed his hands and laid them flat on the window sill instead, where Eli couldn’t see them.

Not to be deterred so easily, Eli crossed the room in three long steps and wrestled Thrawn’s hand off the sill. Thrawn’s eyes flicked down in a cursory glance before returning to the snow-covered fields outside.

He really _ did _ seem to think it was nothing, but Eli knew an infection when he saw it — though certainly he’d never seen one quite like this. The cut across Thrawn’s palm had seemed to be healing fine last time he checked, but now the broken seam of skin was lined — no, _ filled _ — with a substance unlike anything Eli had ever seen before.

Pale, colorless, powdery. 

He brushed the substance with the pad of his thumb, watching Thrawn for any of the little flexes along the planes of his face which signaled pain. There was nothing to be seen. Brow furrowed, Eli drove the blunt edge of his thumbnail into the unhealed skin along the cut, pressing hard — and again noticed no sign of pain in Thrawn.

“Does this hurt?” he asked.

Thrawn projected a brief, distracted wave of dismissal Eli’s way. 

_ You’ve been tangling with a diseased sheep, _ he remarked with interest. Eli frowned at him, still examining the peculiar infection. He broadcasted a wordless question.

_ Stray woollen fibers on your coat, _ Thrawn replied. _ And of course, the faint recesses in the snow near the edge of the woods indicates a curved line of footsteps. Was it gid? _

“I’m inclined to think so,” said Eli. Without asking permission, he felt Thrawn’s forehead for a fever, but he was cool as ever. Thrawn leaned into the touch with an almost offensive lack of subtlety.

_ You’re aware of the American botanist Charles Peck, _ Thrawn said. Or perhaps it was meant to be a question — Eli couldn’t quite tell, so he nodded as he removed his hand from Thrawn’s forehead. _ He’s quite the amateur mycologist, _ Thrawn said. _ You may find one of his recent publications of some interest. _

Again, Eli lifted Thrawn’s infected hand and studied the strange, dusty material clogging the wound. “I can’t follow your train of thought,” he said.

_ Yes, _ said Thrawn sharply, _ you can. _

And, staring at the wound, his face heated from the acerbity of Thrawn’s rebuke, Eli suspected he could. “You think these are spores?” he asked, turning Thrawn’s palm slightly toward the window so that the light reached the peculiar infection.

Thrawn said nothing, and he projected no emotions — yet, somehow, Eli was sure he could detect a hint of satisfaction there. He thought back over Thrawn’s reference to Dr. Peck.

“You couldn’t mean _ Massospora cicadina,” _ he said doubtfully.

This time, he caught the ghost of a smile on Thrawn’s lips. _ You think it an unlikely comparison? _ he asked.

“Yes, I do,” said Eli, “unless you happened to spend the first seventeen years of your life in the soil, feeding off tree roots.” He lowered his gaze, eyeing Thrawn’s belt. “Is your abdomen intact?”

Thrawn laughed.

A moment after it passed — too late for Eli to comment on it — he realized he’d never seen Thrawn laugh before. A strange warmth bloomed in him, nearly drowning out Thrawn’s words.

_ It does primarily affect periodical cicadas, _ Thrawn acknowledged. _ The nymphs encounter it in the soil as they burrow their way to the surface shortly prior to adulthood; the infected display peculiar behavior — the infected males lure healthy males to them by impersonating the female of the species — and in time, the abdomen decays and is replaced by a mass of spore-producing fungus. _

Eli glanced once more at the strange wound on Thrawn’s hand and turned away, his throat dry.

_ It’s possible, I suppose, that I came into contact with this fungus in the soil of the root cellar. But my abdomen _ is _ intact, _ said Thrawn wryly, _ so you have nothing to fear. _

Those words filtered through Eli’s mind as loudly and as clearly as a spoken word — but there was something clinging to their coattails, some soft ghost of a thought he wasn’t meant to hear. It was in Thrawn’s voice, though Eli couldn’t be sure whether he heard it or imagined it.

_ His concern is touching, _it said.

Feeling sickened, Eli looked away. His eyes drifted periodically back to the spores.

It seemed like everyone in Lycia House had a parasite in some form or another.

* * *

The spot in the hallway where _ Coal Miner and Hookworm _ once hung was now bare, leaving a lightened square of wallpaper to mark its existence. Inside his bedroom, Eli’s desk was now covered almost entirely by the massive painting; his jar of leeches had been pushed precariously to one side, a little too close to the window for the leeches’ comfort. It was temporary, Eli told himself; they would live. And if somehow his study of _ Coal Miner and Hookworm _ became prolonged, he could move the leeches somewhere safe.

His dresser, by the washbasin. His bedside table. He could lie in bed with the blankets pulled up to his chest and reach out blindly in the night; he could feel the cold, smooth glass beneath his hands whenever he liked, the leeches sleeping alongside him, drifting as though dead in the water.

Eli shook these thoughts away. His work was indelicate; his knowledge of chemistry was better than the average man’s, but incomplete, and his motivation to uncover the original painting beneath _ Coal Miner and Hookworm _ was not entirely sound. It mattered little to him whether some subtleties of light and depth were vitiated while he uncovered the portrait beneath.

With a paint brush in one hand, a handkerchief clasped over his mouth and nose, and a dusty jar of solvent balanced on the edge of the desk, Eli removed the swirling eddies of mud layer by layer. Since his last encounter with the dying sheep, he had revealed the long and slender fingers of a familiar blue hand, the fine material of a woolen coat now considered old-fashioned, the glint of a tarnished gold ring. The paint was dirty, the colors dim and degraded. 

It was like looking at cornflowers, Eli thought — cornflowers which some unwitting passerby had stamped into the mud.

The fumes of the solvent worked on him, making his head swim and his nose burn from the foul stench. When even his hands began to sting, he capped the bottle and turned away, hoisting his window open with some difficulty. Cold air curled into the room, bringing with it the scent of evergreen trees, fresh snow, the combined musty odors of hay and manure in the stable. Eli leaned on the sill a moment, letting the wind turn his eyes, his throat, his nasal passage all to cold, slick glass.

Gradually, the dizziness faded. When it was gone entirely, Eli spotted the hoofprints in the snow.

The sheep was back. 

Its prints were visible even from his bedroom window, each little mark blurred and stamped into an uneven circle. He rested one palm on the cool glass of the leech jar and stared into the snow so long it blinded him — so long that the white dots marring his vision seeped through their mental link and touched Thrawn’s brain. 

The white dots turned red. The color spread across Eli’s eyes like blood in the water; when he blinked, the unusual scarlet mist was gone, and his vision was clear again.

_ Thank you, _ he said.

Thrawn acknowledged this with a flick of his thoughts that vibrated through Eli’s brain. There was something else there — something subtle — the faintest taste of a question lurking underneath that brief and careless flick. 

_ It’s that sheep again, _ Eli explained. _ It’s back. _

Dismissal thrummed up and down their connection. It was followed by defensiveness, by an almost-reflexive surge of anger. Their thoughts were so thoroughly linked it was difficult to tell who was dismissive and who was angry; Eli withdrew a bit, felt Thrawn do the same, and immediately had the emotions sorted out.

_ It will die before long, _ Thrawn said simply. _ There is nothing you can do. I trust that with a full laboratory, you can accomplish many things; but you do not have a full laboratory nor even a full medical kit here with you. You cannot cure gid. _

Eli thought of the pool in the center of the woods — the scrim of ice over the top of it — the frosted weeds lining the edge of the water like shards of glass in the frame of a broken mirror. The opaque water, so dark it seemed black.

_ Drowning is no gentler a death than gradual decay, _Thrawn said. Something in him (not his entire consciousness, but the undercurrents Eli could so rarely define) seemed to recoil from the water — not with fear, exactly, but with something akin to it. It was the same feeling Eli had sensed once before, when tending to an old man whose liver had failed him due to drink. The man’s adult sons had been there with him at the end; shame had rolled off them in waves, mixed with embarrassment, with frustrated grief and disgust, with a determination to let none of these things show.

Eli said,_ I didn’t show you the pond because I want to drown the sheep. I showed you the pond because I’m worried it will fall in. _

_ Drowning, _ said Thrawn placidly, _ is no harsher a death than gradual decay. _

Eli pulled away from the jar of leeches, placing both hands on the window sill. The hoofprints were nearly covered up now by a gentle wind.

_ Only it isn’t gradual decay, _ he thought to himself, allowing these words to echo a little down the line. _ This isn’t the natural process of aging; this is a young sheep, a healthy sheep, dying because some parasite is feeding off its brain. _

He imagined splitting the sheep’s skull open, peeling back fragments of bone. He imagined digging his fingers into the pink folds of its brain, finding the worms that made it walk a crooked line.

_ A bad death, _ Thrawn agreed with him, _ but at least it will not die alone. _

To that, Eli could think of nothing to say. He stared out the window instead, his chest feeling hollow. In time, Thrawn broke the silence again.

_ It would be kind of you, _ he said, _ to find a spade. _

The tilted, lichen-covered headstones on the edge of the woods. The shovel, half-hidden in the snow. A body covered up in a linen shroud; blue hands tangled in salt-and-pepper hair, cradling a cold head to an even colder chest.

_ It would be kinder still, _ said Thrawn, _ to euthanize it with laudanum from your kit. _

The hollowness in Eli’s chest seemed to fill a little; he drummed his fingers against the window sill and tilted his head to the side. Yes, he could do that; he needed only to catch it and hold it still. Laudanum would bring death to the sheep and the worms alike; it would lull them to sleep so gently they would never notice death burning at the corners of their minds.

Decision made, he reached for his saddle bag.

_ Are you coming? _ he asked.

_ I’ll watch, _ Thrawn said, and Eli felt the strange sensation of someone looking through his eyes, _ from here. _

* * *

Blood dotted the snow around the sheep’s latest footprints — dry brown flecks of it from where the sheep’s hooves had cracked and bled from too much walking; bright, wet spots of it from Eli’s nose. He held his sleeve against his nose, staunching the flow.

The leather handle of the saddle bag creaked beneath his fingers. Chilblains had so thoroughly eaten his fingers that his knuckles were covered in dead, purplish skin, like the edge of a blister. 

He flexed his hands and followed the tracks into the woods. The path meandered, taking him always in a rough circle, always drifting slightly to the left. By the time he’d passed the initial sparse line of trees, he was already dizzy and his eyes felt strained from staying so focused on the snow. He paused a moment, lifted his head up to watch clouds move across the sky.

When his head was clear again, he continued.

_ You’re not entirely healthy yourself, _ Thrawn remarked.

_ You’re one to talk, _ Eli said. Thrawn’s presence retreated from his mind almost immediately, a sure sign that he’d taken offense; it was true, Eli reflected as he walked alone, that Thrawn’s health had improved vastly since they’d formed their bond. What weight he’d lost had been gained back, and all in muscle; he had disposed of Helminth’s body on his own, and with ease. 

_ Fine, _ Eli said. _ It was a cheap shot. I recant. You’re healthy as a _ — _ well, you’re healthy. _

Almost reluctantly, Thrawn’s mind snaked back into his. He could feel the other man gazing through his eyes at the snow, watching Eli follow the tracks, lingering in particular over the drops of fresh blood from Eli’s nose.

_ It would be faster, _ said Thrawn, _ to follow its trajectory rather than its track. _

Eli hesitated, glancing from the hoofprints just ahead of his feet to the blurred, dim line of snow on the horizon. He ran Thrawn’s words back through his head, trying to make sense of them.

_ It is not gibberish, _said Thrawn.

_ I didn’t say it was gibberish, _ Eli protested, though he’d certainly thought it. Thrawn didn’t respond; sighing — his breath puffing out before him, over his blood-crusted sleeve — Eli did his best to concentrate. 

He’d started out walking from the south side of the house; now, two hundred yards into the forest, he was heading southwest, toward the setting sun. Eli turned in a circle, eyeing the spindly trees around him. Eventually, given enough time and space, the sheep would start heading dead west.

Toward the center of the woods.

Toward the pond.

Gritting his teeth, he turned to face the sun, away from the footprints, and took off at a faster pace, pushing through the snow and snapping his way past the clinging branches of plants he couldn’t identify without their leaves — they could have been saplings left over from last spring, or they could’ve been thin and scraggly bushes. Thorns plucked at his sleeves, but did little to hold him back.

He trudged on for another hundred yards, and then a hundred after that. At the foot of a gigantic old oak tree, he stopped, worn out from walking through the snow, from constantly ducking under branches and clambering over old logs. He caught his breath — his nosebleed had dried up, leaving a crust of blood on his nostrils that loaned him an uncomfortable stretching sensation to his skin as he breathed.

He glanced up, as though lengthening his throat might ease the strange sense of urgency coursing through him. High above him, two rotting polypores clung to the trunk of the tree; the blackness of age had stolen away any identifying features they once had. 

_ I’ve gone the wrong way, _ he said.

Amusement flickered down the line; it gave Eli the odd feeling that his link with Thrawn was a candlewick, and the other man’s amusement was a spark running his way. When it hit Eli’s brain, it set fire to his neurons, angering him and revitalizing him at the same time.

He looked down at the ground again. Not five feet away from him, he spotted hoofprints in the snow. His fingers tightened on the handle of the saddle bag; through the trees, distant but not too far from him, he heard a twig snap in the underbrush.

_ Found it, _ he said. 

_ Naturally, _said Thrawn. 

Eli made his way toward the snapping sound, paying no particular heed to his pace or to stealth; he knew from his previous encounter that the sheep was unlikely to hear him coming, and even unlikelier to escape. Within moments, he had it in sight; its coat was dirtier than the day before, its belly crusted with dried mud, mucus ringing its eyes.

Carefully, Eli set his saddle bag down in the snow. He kept one eye on the sheep as he removed the glass bottle of laudanum and an eyedropper; the sheep stumbled slowly westward as Eli uncorked the bottle and gathered a sufficient amount of laudanum into the dropper.

He left the saddle bag then and approached the sheep. It was close to the edge of the pond now; the ice in the center of that dark pool had melted, giving way to the last two days or so of warm-ish weather, but it was still present near the banks in the form of dirt-stained slush.

Before the sheep could turn left and blunder right into the water, Eli blocked it. He grasped the sheep by the jaw with his left hand, keeping the bottle of laudanum tucked into his elbow. With his right, he thrust the eyedropper between its lips.

It brayed, rotten teeth flashing as it bucked away. Its head swung up, colliding with Eli’s right hand, knocking the eyedropper away. With his left hand, reflexively, Eli tried to grab it again, extending his arm when the sheep tossed its head and wheeled away.

_Oh,_ he thought even before the bottle of laudanum dropped from the crook of his elbow, _I’m an idiot._

It hit the surface of the pond with a splash and disappeared. Abruptly, Thrawn slammed down a blockade between his mind and Eli’s — a sure sign, in Eli’s opinion, that he agreed, but didn’t wish to offend. 

Cursing under his breath, Eli released his grip on the sheep’s wool and let it stumble away from him. He knelt in the snow, searching desperately for the eyedropper. The sheep, unable to flee properly, approached him again, quite by mistake, and lurched so that its head struck his chest.

“Stop,” Eli hissed at it. Scrabbling in the snow with one hand, he used his other to push the sheep away. He felt its teeth scrape at the palm of his hand; his nails sunk into something soft and wet, probably its gums, maybe its tongue. 

Disgusted, he abandoned his search. He washed both hands in the snow; blue flecks of paint from his restoration of Coal Miner and Hookworm melted off his palms. He kept his head down, scowling, face red from the abysmal failure this mission of mercy had turned into. He would need to retrace his steps to find the abandoned saddle bag; he’d have to search through it meticulously to find anything else he could use, and it wasn’t likely he had anything so painless as laudanum. Worse, he was certain he didn’t have any other eyedroppers, and once he found his saddle bag he’d have to find the sheep again, with the sun going down on top of everything else that had gone wrong.

He scrubbed at his fingers, cold and red and raw. He dried them on his wool coat and finally glanced up to find the sheep.

It lay no more than five feet away from him, facedown on the edge of the pond. Its nose was dipped ever so slightly into the water. Its eyes were open, staring, blank.

It had died while Eli was washing the paint off his hands.

* * *

It was long past nightfall when he returned to Lycia House. He had dragged the sheep away from the edge of the water and buried it in a snowbank against an old birch tree, just as Thrawn had done — or so he said — with Helminth. 

It occurred to him on the cold walk back that both animals had received a burial of sorts. Pellaeon had not. It occurred to him not long after that -- when the stars were out in full force -- that Thrawn was unlikely to light any lanterns, and with the house as dark as the world around it, Eli couldn’t tell which way, exactly, he was going.

He stopped, shivering in the night chill, and studied the trees around him. He had a vague sense he was heading north toward the house, but it was only his inner sense of direction — helpful, but not entirely trustworthy. He recognized nothing of the scenery around him. 

Glancing down, he could see no hoofprints in the snow, although he was certain the sheep had come this way; there were broken twigs and branches everywhere to prove it. Bending close to a thorny bush, he even found a strand of wool clinging to the wood. But a brisk wind had swept through the woods at ground-level, stirring what sparse plant life there was, wiping the sheep’s hoofprints away. 

_ Thrawn, _ said Eli, a sense of weariness descending on him all at once, _ lift the barrier. _

There was no response. There were times when Thrawn affected not to hear; there were times, too, when Eli suspected the problem lay with him — when he suspected he had not quite mastered the art of communicating via telepathy the way Thrawn had. The way Pellaeon must have. 

_ Thrawn, _ he called again, more insistently this time. He rooted through his own brain until he found the thin wire that connected their minds. He traveled down it as quickly as he could; with the barrier in place, it was like climbing the face of a cliff in utter darkness, with no rope to belay his fall. He had to claw and scrabble for every inch of ground gained.

When at last he could feel Thrawn’s mind beneath his hands, it was like knocking at a locked door. It was like trying to read Braille. 

Eli closed his eyes, concentrating all his energy on that barricade. He visualized it as a physical entity, tried to squeeze his fingers into the cracks and pull it open. It didn’t budge. No light shone through.

Refusing to pull away, he said, _ Thrawn, the sheep is dead. I am lost. Lift the barrier so I can find my way home. _

There was no response. Teeth gritted, eyes open again, Eli pushed onward through the snow. Three hundred yards, he told himself — the pond was no deeper than three hundred yards into the woods. If he kept walking north — assuming he was walking north — he would be to the yard in no time, with or without a beacon to call him home.

Still, as he shivered and stumbled through the snow — as tree branches dragged across his face and plucked at his skin — he couldn’t help but curse Thrawn vehemently, sending each and every vile thought he could come up with soaring through their link and crashing straight into the barricade.

What was the point, he wondered, of keeping the barricade up even now? Thrawn had lowered it — or so Eli assumed — only to avoid offending Eli by agreeing that he was an idiot for losing the laudanum. That had been an hour ago, he reckoned; there was no reason to keep him shut out now. 

The longer he stomped through the woods, the more his anger simmered. It did not soothe him at all when he reached the edge of the trees and climbed out of the woods, right into the Car’das family plot. It gave him little satisfaction to learn his sense of direction had been right; he fixed his eyes on the door to Lycia House and everything inside him seemed to curdle, turning hot and cold all at once.

He recalled with sickened clarity the leeches which squirmed in Helminth’s mouth on the stable floor. He recalled standing here in this very graveyard, stabbing the tip of a spade into the frozen ground, with Pellaeon’s body lying nearby. He looked at his hands -- blisters from that day had healed into calluses -- and remembered the old man dying alone in town, the delivery boy who followed shortly after.

The sheep.

He released his anger in one long, cold exhale and approached Lycia House. The horse nickered at him as he passed the stable, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at it; not now. He pushed the front door open, throwing all his weight into it, and stopped in the parlor just beyond. Reaching out. Searching for Thrawn.

He closed his eyes, let the thrum of their connection guide him. He walked blindly past the statue of the ghost shark in the parlor; he entered the kitchen, walked steadily to the edge of the root cellar door and stopped there.

He opened his eyes again. The trapdoor was open; he was inches away from the dark maw of the cellar. 

_ Thrawn, _ he said, _ open your mind. _

This time, the barricade seemed to instantly dissolve. This sensation brought with it no hint of emotion; Thrawn’s mind was only gone one moment and there the next. Silently, still standing at the edge of the trapdoor, Eli did something he had never done before, but had felt Thrawn do to him a hundred times.

He stepped up to Thrawn’s eyes and looked through them, like looking through a window.

He saw the darkness of the root cellar, everything tinged slightly with red — yet strangely full of color, every shade and subtlety easily distinguishable. It was impossible for Eli to reconcile; it gave him a nauseating sense of disorientation. 

It took him minutes to adjust to Thrawn’s vision; gradually, he was able to decipher the sights before him. Deep in the root cellar, Thrawn was sitting with his back against the dirt wall; pulled over his chest, still wrapped in his silken shroud, was Pellaeon’s body. Thrawn’s face was tangled in the corpse’s hair; its face was pressed against his abdomen, eyes closed, lashes brushing the fabric of Thrawn’s shirt.

Between their link, Eli could feel Thrawn shivering from the cold. He could feel himself shivering too, more distantly, more abstractly. 

_ You’re not supposed to be down there, _Eli said. The rage he’d felt on his way home had not leaked out of him; rather, it felt like he’d corked it up inside one of the glass bottles in his saddle bag. Like he was saving it for later, carrying it at his side until it was needed.

Mutely — knowing that Eli had stepped up to his eyes — Thrawn turned Pellaeon’s head. Pale powder rimmed the dead man’s lips and nostrils; with his thumb, Thrawn pulled Pellaeon’s bottom lip away from his teeth, revealing the same powdery spores caught between his teeth and eating away at his gums. A moment later -- when he was sure Eli had seen this and processed it -- Thrawn tugged Pellaeon’s collar down, exposing the bloodless wound on his neck.

_ I think, _ Thrawn said, sounding amused and sorrowful all at once, _ he’s avenged himself rather nicely, hasn’t he? _

He turned his hand palm up, brushing back Pellaeon’s hair, resting his knuckles gently against the dead man’s cheek. The cut on his hand was exposed; the colorless substance lining his wound matched the powder in Pellaeon’s mouth and gaping neck exactly.

_ Any sign of myiosis? _ Eli asked. He could see no sign of insect life on Pellaeon’s body; there was nothing living on him, it seemed, except the spores. Seconds ticked by without any sort of response from Thrawn, but in a moment, Eli felt the subtle discomfort of Thrawn probing his brain, searching for information.

_ Myiosis, _ Eli said, providing it for him. _ Maggot infestation. _

_ He’arch’ra, _ Thrawn replied. The strange, hissing sound of that word — undeniably, it was a word, though Eli wasn’t sure how he knew this — unnerved him. Through their connection, he could see the mental image Thrawn connected to this word, _ he’arch’ra _, and knew it was an approximate translation of myiosis. 

_ No, _ Thrawn said, and very gently he touched Pellaeon’s lips again. _ No myiosis. _

Silently, through Thrawn’s eyes, Eli took one last look at Pellaeon’s corpse. When he pulled back, he kept a firm grip on Thrawn’s mind.

_ Come upstairs, _ he said. _ I need you to show me where the linseed oil is. _

Thrawn threw an image Eli’s way — a cupboard upstairs, in Pellaeon’s sick room, a dusty bottle hidden in a drawer.

_I need you to show me,_ Eli insisted. _Come._

He could sense Thrawn’s stubbornness, his forthcoming refusal to move. In turn, he knew Thrawn could sense the rage still pulsing inside Eli, tangling together with the exhaustion from his long trek through the snow and his grief over Helminth, over Pellaeon — a man he barely knew — over the lost sheep.

Over himself, wasting away in Lycia House, so thoroughly connected to Thrawn that he never wanted to leave.

_ Come, _ Eli said again, and this time he was certain Thrawn would listen. _ Show me. _

It was a long moment before Thrawn pulled the shroud over Pellaeon’s face and set the corpse aside.

* * *

He lit the candles in his bedroom, mentally directing Thrawn to sit on the bed. Thrawn acted like he hadn’t heard the request; he stood over Eli’s desk, gazing down at _ Coal Miner and Hookworm, _ at the hints of blue skin showing through the murky upper layer. 

“He was an awful painter, your Car’das,” Eli said. Thrawn didn’t respond; sometimes it seemed as though he couldn’t be provoked, no matter what Eli said. He stared down at the painting impassively, his face unreadable, hands clasped behind his back.

The more placid he was, the angrier Eli became. His jaw ached from being clenched so tightly for so long. 

“Come here,” he said, all too aware of the bite in his voice. “Sit on the damn bed.”

With one last look at the painting, Thrawn obeyed. He ran his uninjured palm over the glass jar full of leeches as he went, folding himself gracefully on Eli’s mattress. Eli stood nearby at the dresser, where he was carefully mixing together a solution of crystallized carbolic acid from his kit and linseed oil from the sick room. When it was finished, he soaked an old rag in it — one of his handkerchiefs, the only one currently clean enough for use — and brought it over to Thrawn.

He turned Thrawn’s injured hand palm up, ran his thumb over the split skin. With the edge of his nail, he dug out as much of the colorless powder as he could; Thrawn watched him calmly — not flinching, not even twitching — but Eli could feel the sharp flickers of pain through their connection. It gave him a grim sense of satisfaction, being able to hurt Thrawn like this, even in so petty a way. 

Twisting his wrist, Eli stabbed his thumbnail into the tender flesh of Thrawn’s wound; Thrawn’s palm flexed in response, not quite a flinch but enough to make Eli smile.

_ Eli, _Thrawn said. It was impossible to read his thoughts, impossible to assign an emotion to that single word.

_ This will sting, _ Eli replied.

He applied the wet cloth to Thrawn’s wound. This time, he felt the pain through their connection more intensely than before -- a low-level, insistent burn that surged against Eli’s consciousness and forced him to take a step back. Thrawn bore it without expression; deftly, with one hand, he tied the poultice tight against his wound.

_ This will heal it? _ Thrawn asked.

_ It’s an antiputrefactive, _ Eli said. _ It will kill the infection; the wound will heal in time. _

Thrawn glanced at him. His lips twitched into a smile. _ You don’t want to see me rot, he said. _

Under the flickering candlelight, Eli considered it. He studied Thrawn’s face — the high cheekbones, the diseased, almond-shaped eyes, the noble line of his jaw and powerful set of his shoulders. He thought of Helminth in the stables, the sheep with its nose in the pond, the leeches left behind in the Car’das family plot.

Pellaeon. Jorj Car’das. Coal Miner and Hookworm, the portrait underneath.

_ I don’t want to see you rot the same way he is, _ Eli said.

Thrawn smiled. 

* * *

Eli woke to the murky, grey light of what he thought was dawn; a moment later, rubbing the grit from his eyes, he realized it was dusk. The sun was already on its way down; he’d slept through daylight entirely.

He ran his fingers through his hair, greasy and filled with minuscule twigs from yesterday’s march through the woods. He could feel dirt on his cheeks and dry blood still crusted on his nose and just above his upper lip. Groaning, he sat up, his elbow bumping against Thrawn’s chest, and rolled out of bed.

The water in the washbasin was close to freezing; he scrubbed his face with it, anyway, allowing the cold to sink into his skin and startle him awake. With clear eyes, he turned back to the window, to the dark trees on the edge of the yard.

He could feel everything Thrawn was doing without looking; it was like he was doing it himself, but with his eyes closed — or like an echo of Thrawn’s action was playing out inside his skull. He felt Thrawn’s eyes crack open, felt him raise his injured hand above his head and turn it this way and that, studying the poultice in the dark. 

He could feel, too, that Thrawn was colder without Eli lying next to him. He could feel the other man turn this over in his own mind, examining the feeling as clinically as he’d examined the wound on his hand. Eli knew intrinsically that if he gave it a moment longer, Thrawn would use their link to draw him back.

“Get dressed,” said Eli, stopping Thrawn before he’d even begun to consciously consider it. “I want you to see the sheep.”

Thrawn looked a question at him. Eli only shrugged; it was easier to lie when he spoke aloud, but that didn’t mean it was effortless. 

“There was something wrong with it,” he said, which was as good an excuse as any. “Something other than gid. I want you to take a look at it.”

Silence stretched between them; Eli couldn’t get a good read on Thrawn, couldn’t tell if he believed the lie or not. Eventually, without giving anything away, Thrawn sat up, letting the blankets fall away from his bare chest. Eli’s stomach rolled; he resisted the urge to look away and instead forced himself to take it in, to face what had lain next to him all night and all day.

“Take them off,” he said, his mouth dry. “Please.”

Thrawn’s left hand came up reflexively, half-covering the leech which sucked at his collarbone. He glanced at Eli, frowning thoughtfully, but plucked the leech off him without question. He deposited it in the jar on the bedside table, sinking his hand up to the wrist in the cold water before he let it go. He removed the others as well — the one on his neck beneath the jaw, the one attached to his side — and ran his hand absently over the small puncture wounds they’d left behind. 

Idly, without leaving the bed, he searched for his shirt. Eli found it for him, pushed it into Thrawn’s injured hand. Thrawn accepted the shirt with a nod of thanks and pulled it on. He brushed his hair back, forcing each stray strand of it to lie flat. 

He tasted his fingers, smiling at Eli like a shark. 

“You’re wasting time,” Eli said, a lump welling in his throat. “Let’s go.”

He left the room, forcing Thrawn to follow him at his leisure. Dimly, through their connection, Eli could feel Thrawn basking in the heightened sensuality that came from waking up after a long night’s sleep; he took his time adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves and fixing his collar. Eli was already at the front door when he felt Thrawn leave the room, searching without much urgency for his coat.

“Down here,” Eli called, eyeing the coat, which hung from a peg on the wall across from him. Thrawn descended the stairs without a sound, seeming almost to glide down them. He caught Eli’s eye as he shrugged into the coat, almost smiling.

It was deliberate provocation — he sensed Eli’s rage and he was doing his utmost to stoke it higher. But knowing this didn’t do a damn thing to prevent Eli from being provoked. He ground his teeth, scowled out the window, did everything possible to keep his anger in check.

“Are you done?” he asked, voice low. 

Faint pleasure emitted from Thrawn. To Eli, it felt like the noxious glow of pollution.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

He led Thrawn across the snowy ground of Lycia House. They walked straight through the graveyard, stepping over the low stone walls which boxed in generations of Car’das corpses. It was easy to push through the trees and underbrush; Eli had cleared the path for them both the night before as he stumbled through.

Walking as the crow flies, it took them only ten minutes to reach the dark pond. Ten minutes, when last night Eli had struggled, blind and lost, for more than an hour to find his way home. He walked past the birch tree where the sheep was buried without even glancing its way and felt Thrawn hesitate behind him, red eyes sliding downward to the heap of snow.

_ Thrawn, _ Eli called, _ come here. _

Without hesitation, Thrawn joined him. He stood at Eli’s side, his shoulder touching Eli’s shoulder, his bandaged hand brushing Eli’s fingers. He stared out at the water, following Eli’s gaze. But Eli wasn’t looking at anything in particular; there was nothing Thrawn could see would give him a hint to Eli’s thoughts.

_ There, _ Eli said. His jaw was set, his eyes fixed on the dark water. _ Right there, in the center of that pond. _

Thrawn inclined his head, eyes flickering over the surface with detached interest.

_ Take a look, _ Eli said.

Thrawn glanced at him, an amused and appraising look, as though he were checking to see how serious Eli was. He could sense, no doubt, what Eli meant when he said _ Take a look. _

_ I can see it well enough from here, _Thrawn said. 

Eli considered this. He turned the architecture of Thrawn’s mind over inside his own, seeking the underthoughts hidden in the blueprints. If he found the right emotions — the right thoughts — the right motivators, he could convince Thrawn to do what needed to be done.

He grasped hold of something that made his molars ache. He couldn’t be sure what exactly it was, but it called to him.

So _ he _ called to _ it_. He coaxed it toward him; he let it twine around his thoughts until it was embedded in every neuron, a white-hot blue line twisting through him. He twisted it.

_ Please, _ he said, _ step into the pond. _

Thrawn gazed at him a moment longer, his expression inscrutable. He raised one eyebrow, but Eli couldn’t catch a single hint of emotion off him; when Thrawn nodded a little and stepped forward, he sensed only amusement and acquiescence from the other man.

Gingerly, Thrawn stepped into the pond, setting all his weight on the edges of his feet so as not to upset the mud beneath the water. There was no splash as he eased into it; only the slightest ripples circled away from his feet. The water covered his shoes, then soaked into his trousers at the ankles and ate its way up to his calves.

Five steps in, he turned and stared at Eli, eyebrows raised.

_ Kneel, _ Eli said.

Thrawn did not acquiesce. He stood in the icy water, his shoulders twitching in minute, carefully-controlled shivers, with his hands clasped behind his back and his head tilted ever-so-slightly to the side. Examining Eli. Scrutinizing him, watching him.

_ Kneel, _ Eli said, and he grabbed hold of the same part of Thrawn’s mind that he had before. He twisted again, expecting it not to work. _ Knowing _ it would not work.

Thrawn slammed to his knees in the pond. Water splashed up against his neck and face; mud spattered his chest, his arms. From his mind, Eli caught a flash of surprise — mild, but present nonetheless — and amusement, just a little — and something like pleasure. Something like a primal thirst for more.

When Thrawn glanced up at Eli again, there was a glint in his eyes and a tight smile on his lips and Eli, trembling, was unable to return it.

_ Tell me where you came from, _ he said, and Thrawn’s eyes slid closed. His chin tilted up. He looked like a man at the orchestra savoring a particularly fine composition.

Some of this observation must have bled into their connection. _ That description, _ said Thrawn, _ is more apt than you think. Your thoughts are often like the strings of a cello, Eli. They vibrate with whichever emotion you’re feeling at the time. _

Eli’s leg twitched suddenly and he tried to hide it by shifting position in the frosted grass. He knew what it was — the urge to run had almost overtaken him. It was basic instinct to push that adrenaline-based response away, to suppress it. He embraced it instead. He channeled it from his own mind into Thrawn’s, and Thrawn—

Thrawn’s lips twitched; he put his head down; he shook it off and faced Eli again, projecting more amusement than ever.

_ You think I crawled up out of this pond and attached myself to Jorj like a leech, _ he said.

Eli’s jaw was clenched; his lips were trembling as he whispered, “I don’t _ think_. I know.”

The corners of Thrawn’s mouth stretched wider, his lips closed firmly over his teeth, but this time Eli didn’t sense even a hint of amusement. Through their connection, he could feel the water numbing every inch of Thrawn’s skin from his hips down; the mud sucking at his knees, his feet, keeping him anchored to the bottom of the pond; the sodden leaves from last autumn swirling sluggishly around his submerged hands, the wet clothes clinging tightly to his skin.

_ You _ don’t _ know, _ Thrawn said, not harshly. His shoulders shifted and Eli tensed automatically before he realized Thrawn was only removing his hands from the pond. Gently, with brackish water pouring off his fingers, Thrawn grasped his own jaw and manually turned his head from side to side, exposing his neck to Eli. Under the moonlight, the colors blended together so deeply it was almost impossible to tell where Thrawn ended and the pond began.

_ No gills, _ Thrawn said, running two fingers down the side of his neck. _ See? _

“Do leeches have gills?” Eli asked. 

Thrawn’s eyes narrowed. He dropped his hands back into the pond; Eli felt the burning sensation of ice-water swallowing them up, the cold eating its way up Thrawn’s skin like corrosive acid.

“Leeches,” said Eli, “have neither gills nor lungs. How am I to know you aren’t breathing through your skin?”

_ You could try drowning me, _ said Thrawn.

Eli took a step forward. Thrawn’s shivering stopped; the slow expansion of his chest stopped, too. His eyes flicked down to Eli’s shifting feet.

He knew, but he didn’t stand. He didn’t walk away. He didn’t fight.

He knelt there, perfectly still, his head tilted up and his eyes locked onto Eli’s as Eli stepped into the pool of dark water. 

He put his hands on Thrawn’s shoulders. He guided him gently, firmly under the surface and Thrawn went without a fight. The dark water seemed almost to consume him; it devoured his chest, his unprotected neck; it covered his lips as quickly as a kiss.

And just before Eli twisted his fingers into Thrawn’s hair and forced his head underwater, Thrawn closed his eyes — not like a child who squinches his eyes closed when anticipating pain, but like a weary man who lets his eyes slide shut in anticipation of a good night’s sleep. 

For sixty long seconds, nothing came through their connection at all. Eli stood trembling in the water, unable to see his hands and scarcely able to feel Thrawn beneath the surface. Not physically, not mentally.

Dimly, he felt water burning up his nostrils and down his throat. His lungs spasmed; he coughed, twisted his head to the side.

He forced the sensation aside and kept Thrawn under for another minute. When the sensations faded entirely — when he could feel his own lungs expanding and when he couldn’t touch Thrawn’s mind at all — he gave in.

He pulled Thrawn back into the air. He kept his fingers tangled in Thrawn’s hair for a moment, just until the other man coughed. Eli was already walking away when he heard the splash of water pouring into water; he knew from the weak twitch of their connection, from the tightness of his own esophagus, that Thrawn was vomiting up the water he’d swallowed while he was down.

He reached the grass again and dragged his shoes to wipe the mud off them. He could do nothing about the wetness of his trousers or his sleeves. He stamped his feet, trying to drive some warmth back into his body, and turned to face Thrawn again.

_ Stay kneeling, _ he said, and Thrawn did, though his posture now was much worse than before. He leaned forward in the water up to his chest, all his weight resting on his hands, as he coughed and gagged. His hair hung over his forehead, dripping dirty water down his nose and over his lips.

Their connection flickered, surged.

It seemed stronger than before, Eli noticed.

_ Tell me the truth, _ he said. _ Where did you come from? _

Gasping inaudibly for air, Thrawn sat up, removing one hand from the pond and shaking the water and mud off as best he could. There was nothing for him to dry it on; eyes focused on Eli, glowing dimly in the night, he ran the back of his hand over his mouth.

He was hiding a smile. Eli couldn’t see it, but he knew it nonetheless. He could feel that smile thrumming through his own mind.

_ Jorj Car’das was a traveler, _ Thrawn said. His mental voice was strong and clear, unaffected by the near-drowning Eli had subjected him to. _ He left his ancestral home when he was a young man and journeyed to many nations which are now extinct and many villages and cities of which you’ve never heard. In one of these, he stumbled over territory which wasn’t his own. _

The trees around them seemed to fade. For a moment, Eli saw ice beneath his feet, felt snow falling into his hair and landing on his shoulders. The sudden coldness froze the wet material of his trousers from the knee down. 

He caught a glimpse — half-sight, half-thought — of a fair-haired boy no older than nineteen looking up at him, awe and fear commingling in his eyes.

_ He had a taste for the idiosyncratic, _ Thrawn said. _ It was at his insistence that I came to Lycia House. I was his guest here, as you are mine. _

_ Why? _ Eli said. _ He wished to study you? _

A hint of amusement. A glimpse of pale fingers holding a paintbrush up to Thrawn’s bare torso, comparing the pigment on the bristles to the blue tint of Thrawn’s throat. A sensation of warm skin burning against Eli’s own. The taste of copper on his tongue.

_ Study me, _ Thrawn said, and he smiled wide, baring his teeth. _ Yes, he studied me. As did Gilad. _

He brushed his wet hair off his forehead. Dark water rolled down his jawline and dripped off his chin, hitting the surface of the pond without a ripple. He flashed his teeth at Eli. 

_ As are you, _ he said, and when Eli said nothing — when Eli only stood there, his breath stuck in his throat, his entire body sagging from exhaustion — Thrawn said, _ Does that explanation satisfy you? _

Eli didn’t reply. He reached for their connection, brought Thrawn’s mind closer to his own, too weary to bother projecting his thoughts. 

_ Good, _ said Thrawn. _ Then may I stand? _

Silently, Eli waded back into the pool and held out his hand. Thrawn grasped him just below the elbow, his fingers cold and firm, and used Eli as leverage to pull free of the sucking mud.

Together, they made the long, cold walk back to Lycia House.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Leech: Portrait](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23553364) by [RAZZMATAZZz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RAZZMATAZZz/pseuds/RAZZMATAZZz)
  * [dead horse (bury the hatchet)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23590516) by [RAZZMATAZZz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RAZZMATAZZz/pseuds/RAZZMATAZZz)
  * [Leech: Character Designs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23627674) by [RAZZMATAZZz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RAZZMATAZZz/pseuds/RAZZMATAZZz)


End file.
